THE INFLUENCE OF PERSONALITY IN CHRISTIAN LOYALITIES
AND THE SACRED NECESSITY OF DISSENT
Catholics today (indeed Christians of varying stripes) are separating themselves or allowing themselves to be separated into two ideological camps. Each camp is convinced of the righteousness of its position. I want to propose that the opposing views are governed by different mind-sets, each a distinct way of viewing reality, and that they find their genesis in specific personality styles. What I hope to define is that dissent is not only inevitable to the process of growth, but also necessary for wholeness, holiness and authentic community. My experience as a psychologist is that the current impasse and polemic is directly related to the lack of understanding of the value of these differences between what we can call Guardian and Pilgrim personality types. They are not always dichotomous but in fact can exist as a continuum in many persons.
I suggest that the Guardian type of personality seeks certainty, finality, decisiveness, order and organization. Reality must be clearly defined, particularly divine reality. No question is to be left unsettled. The Guardian personality has to belong, but only to that which is structured and final. It wishes to preserve all that is good and holy, no matter the cost. Dissent is regarded as destructive of unity, disloyal, messy and deserving of nothing more than suspicion. The Guardian looks to the past and to its preservation.
The Guardian has a parental perspective; a sense of responsibility for others, a natural respect for authority, and a desire for hierarchy and titles. There is a strong sense of the history of the organization with a dedication to its traditions, norms and procedures. The need for security, stability, rules, regulations and standard operating procedures prevails. That portion of reality which can be controlled must be rendered predictable. Generally serious and concerned, the Guardian wants to protect, stand watch and to warn of potential dangers.
The Guardian looks to precedent and to a notion of tradition marked by a virtually immutable continuity. Innovation is viewed with suspicion.
"If it is working, why change it?" is a motto. Terms such as "pillar of strength", "salt of the earth" and "backbone of society," describe their personality orientation. Dissent is viewed as undermining authority and fracturing unity; it is wrong, abhorrent, willfully factious, and to be withstood at all costs.
Yet there is much to be valued in this sense of reality. This type of personality has built and still sustains most of our societal institutions. The Guardian gravitates to and prospers in positions of authority in all our organizations. When they are not administrators, they make loyal and dedicated followers. Guardian types are estimated to constitute about one-third of the population, as measured by Jungian typology.
The personality type which I shall term the Pilgrim has a different perspective of reality. The Pilgrim believes that the church only through the catalyst of constructive criticism can be truthful and honest, and ultimately holy. This is because its leaders are human with all of the foibles and imperfections endemic to the human condition. Pilgrims view the failure of the Christian Churches to confront the anti-semitism of Nazi Germany from 1932 to 1945 as a sin-filled and evil participation, even acquiescence, in the Holocaust. To them, the Church of history has been oppressive of human freedom and an obstacle to the development of modern science. They also know that beliefs one age has held vigorously have been seen by a later age as historically biased and even corrupt, such as the practice of slavery and racial discrimination within the American experience. They remember the pervasive sense of sin and guilt within the Catholic communal dynamic before Vatican II. There is shame, and indeed pain for the harm and guilt that their church has imposed upon all kinds of people in previous centuries--even torture and death--all in the name of God, because "error had no rights."
The Pilgrim personality believes that the Church cannot be faithful to its vocation without facing up to and honestly confronting its failures, its blindness, and its historical infidelities. Without doing this, there is great pretense and illusion. Sincere believers have inflicted enormous harm because of their inability or unwillingness to critique themselves or be critiqued. History graphically demonstrates the lack of courage, compassion, and fidelity to the Gospel on the part of Church leadership, even at the highest levels. But to the Guardian mentality, these views are heretical and should not be given a hearing in any official forum or orthodox media.
An insistence on dialogue and dissent, the Hegelian dialectic if you will, can be regarded as more American, English or French rather than Germanic, Eastern European or even Oriental. It is the conviction of the Pilgrim that freedom of inquiry is integral to authentic religious community. Conversation and argument are a sine qua non. All of authority and tradition itself must be subject to scrutiny and validation by the test of experience and reason. If nothing else, the lesson of Vietnam was that our leaders can lie unabashedly and spill innocent blood unconscionably. Therefore, sincerity of belief is never sufficient criterion, no matter how intense the persuasion. Motives of power and privilege can just as easy influence religious authority. Dissent always deserves a hearing even when it is wrong-headed. Dialogue and confrontation are critically needed in the quest for a deeper understanding of truth and the integrity of the community. Pilgrim types are estimated to comprise from one-fourth to one-third of the population, most likely "intuitives" according to Jungian typology. A spectrum of loyalties lies between the two extremes.
The point of intervention for the Guardian types is Scripture, Creed, Code and religious authority. These constitute immutable doctrine which must convert the world--a world intrinsically evil that has nothing of value to teach the Church. Revelation is final and complete; they are its guardians sustaining all others with the answers they already possess. God is transcendent Otherness-- the same yesterday, today and forever. Grace is found through approved channels.
The Pilgrim, on the other hand, believes that the church must be constantly and insistently challenged by the world. The American experience and all contemporary thought, whether religious in origin or not, have something instructive to offer the church. "Every heresy is the revenge of a forgotten truth." The Pilgrim discovers truth outside traditional sacred texts, finding an emerging immanence of God everywhere: through reason, through people, through nature and science. Nothing human is alien. Reality itself is heuristic of God-- Who is ever new and different because a more profound understanding of truth is constantly emerging. Grace and serendipity are almost synonymous.
Guardians are more static--feet firm planted and grounded. Pilgrims are on the move, always arriving, never arrived. For the Pilgrim questions are basic to the life process. The Pilgrim sometimes strays off the identified path, curious to search and explore. Guardians tend to be home-bodies. They stress unity; Pilgrims, freedom. Guardians are preservers; Pilgrims innovators. Guardians are either-or; Pilgrims are both-and., but each orientation is vital and necessary for wholeness, holiness and community.
Each of these personality types is in fact engaged in the same quest. Each sees reality not as it is but as it wishes it to be, and thus, distorted. Each naively demands the other accept reality as they see it. Enneagram theory explains nine basic illusions one of which each person occupies. Each view is partial, needing correction, needing the differing gifts of others to form community, even to be whole. The inevitable selectivity of human perception is one of the psychological bases forming our need for Church as the complete revelation of Christ in His Mystical Body. We cannot know God in His Totality without the dynamic if others. We can know ourselves and our projection of ourselves upon others, but not the Stranger in our midst.
In dialogue with others, we become corrected and enriched by their point of view. Without this correction, our bias prevails both for ourselves and for anyone over whom we exercise influence. So long as we experience only our own kind, we are never confronted by those who differ with us or from us. This limits us to a subjective perception of reality, partial at best. For the sake of wholeness and community, encounter with others, even those proposing egregious dissent, is necessary and constructive.
Because our world-view is often limited by our subjectivity, personal growth or authentic community cannot occur without acknowledging genuine differences. To say, "I dissent" is to say "we exist in relationship." Authority imposed from the outside limits and deters the formation of community, and, in fact, inhibits the Spirit working through the People of God. Yet neither the Catholic lay person nor simple priest has any voting rights vis-a-vis pastor or bishop, an exclusion not found in other confessions.
The right and ability to dissent was the foundation of the American experiment. Without giving voice to and legitimizing dissent through ballot and the democratic process, we would still be wallowing in monarchy, dictatorship, oppression, and the denial of human rights. In 1991, we witnessed most of the Communist world shifting to governments in which dissent became legitimate. The current Pope facilitated this movement by encouraging the Solidarity opposition in Poland. Yet he refuses to allow the same legitimacy within his own Church. Without the Period of the Enlightenment, the Church would still be what it too often had been historically, an arm of the government to guarantee and insure conformity. Unfortunately, as the pages of history too graphically reveal, the Church as institution has been the stalwart protector of the status quo, silenced the prophets of every age, and resisted all change. It resisted every movement to give rights to people. Inequality, we were told for centuries, would be corrected in heaven.
Jesus was a dissent-- he resisted the status quo of the Pharisees and Scribes. He identified with the alienated and the disenfranchised. He confronted, challenged, corrected, and broke with tradition for the sake of tradition. His face-off with the religious authorities of the time led directly to His death, yet He surrendered so masterfully to His state-sanctioned execution that he offered hope and transcendence to all the oppressed of history. He came to free us from oppression of every kind. Until we experience his radically liberating Spirit with its right to search and inquire as integral to the modern Church, we will continue to miss the radical discipleship He wants to empower.
The right to dissent is embued, then, with holiness poured forth by God who introduced difference and diversity so that we might learn from and grow through one another. When differences are respected and honored, dissent can challenge, invigorate, enhance and heal. It can lead us out of ourselves to a new awareness of others, a recognition of the incompleteness of our own truth, and a renewed wonder of the mystery of grace. Dissent can be creative and constructive and instructive in the dynamic movement of the human towards the divine. Yet without respect for personhood and dignity of others, dissent becomes destructive. The encounter with human diversity while listening and valuing that diversity, coupled with the realization of how the idealized ego will inevitably fail in objectivity, is a necessary step towards the integration of the individual with consequent wholeness and enhancement of true community.
As a pastoral counselor and psychotherapist for thirty plus years, I have had personal experience with the great harm done by well-meaning Catholic authority. Because of its profound effect on me, I can most probably be classified with the Pilgrim group. I firmly believe that until the Church can in all candor critique itself and repent of its obsession with power and privilege, it can be neither honest nor holy. It will continue to be irrelevant to most of society. It will maintain its pretensions, and worship its hidden idols, while failing to respect the call of each of us to be intimate and equal co-creators with God, enjoying and fulfilling the genuine freedom of the children of God.
Some curious friends have wondered why I remain committed to a Church that I find oppressive in its patriarchalism,. that seems deliberately blind to itself and deaf to the many ways its structures and policies inhibit the Spirit, and that refuses to examine its hidden idols? My response is simply because I believe that the Spirit of Jesus is more completely here than anywhere else. I am in solidarity with the motto of John XXIII who said: "Unity in essential matters; freedom in doubtful matters; love in all matters."
A key problem in all of this is that the Guardians are the ones usually in charge, who set the agendas, who are more willing to silence and ostracize those who take exception. The Guardians are imbued with a metaphysical certitude that their view is the only one which must prevail. Their subjective view of reality is not viewed as partial, as needing any correction or balance. Their view is the only correct view. I propose that this dynamic absolutizes the pathway to God, rather an God. Guardian types absolutize their own authority, and are threatened by any challenge to the status quo. They alone are on the-side-of-the-angels; those who differ must, per se, be further from God and grace..
What each view forgets is that we hold our perceptions only through grace, through the giftedness of faith. The only fitting response to this is a radical humility and awe in the presence of the unfathomable mystery we call God.
Awe and wonder in the presence of this mystery brings great respect for the diverse expressions of this mystery in and through others and a willingness to be instructed by the views and journeys of others. Immersing ourselves in these kind of settings brings an appreciation how myriad and divergent are the ways of the Spirit in leading the people of God.
Feast of Pentecost