INFJ – neumatikos

I think I’ve mentioned before that I’m a mystic. But I’ve discovered that word makes some people, particularly non-charismatic evangelicals, nervous, so let me explain. By “mystic” I mean a person whose devotional life is characterized by intensely affecting spiritual experiences. These experiences may be in the realm of simple theological insight, or they may take more literary forms. At times they may cross over into the realm of prophecy; that is, dreams, visions, words, and phrases laden with theological context.

From a natural perspective, mysticism can come from two sources. It can be personal, or social: On the social spectrum, mysticism can be presented as something to aspire to. Some Christian traditions – the Pentecostals, the Orthodox, some revivalist traditions – present mysticism in such a way that it seems to be the only way to have a properly Christian devotional life. At the other extreme, some traditions, particularly the Reformed and Protestants as a whole, seem to perceive mysticism at best as something useless, at worst as something suspiciously unchristian, smacking of Papism, adding to scripture, even beckoning the demonic. On the personal spectrum, a person could be naturally predisposed to have certain kinds of experiences, or they could find themselves completely unable to do so, or they could be somewhere in between. (Please note that, for the sake of simplicity, I’m lumping what a person thinks about these things in with the social scale.)

The difficulty, of course, comes when a person’s natural predisposition doesn’t align very well with the tradition they find themselves in. Continue reading “Mystic”

Richard Hobson gives me permission to write this sort of thing:

A few weeks ago, my mother sent me a personality test. A real one – not one of those quizilla things. It turns out that I am an INFJ on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator: An introverted, intuitive, feeling, judging type (In this case, “judging” refers to the act of making a decision, or defining something, rather than the act of condeming). We are rare birds, quite literally – INFJs are approximately 1-2% of the human population. If you have 100 friends, and I am one of them, then you might have one other friend who has a similar personality to mine, and if you know who that other person is, I really wish you’d introduce them to me because it’s getting a little bit weird over here being the only one.

The Personality Page has a list of potential career options for INFJs, starting with clergy, then teaching. Next, if you skip over the medical options which are nulled by my aversion to cutting and poking people, there comes psychology, psychiatry, and counseling, which are options I had actually at one time considered. So it seems I have been unwittingly working my way down the list. Continue reading “Gathering Ambrosia”