Conversations That Didn’t Happen

14 March, 201615 March, 2016Marissa

I’m staring out the backseat window watching unplanted fields roll by while having a conversation. It’s going pretty well — we’re exchanging ideas, sharing authentic feelings, clarifying anything that was unclear earlier — in short, it’s the kind of meaningful conversation I crave with people I care about. Only one problem: it’s all happening in my head and the guy I’m talking with has no clue we just had this conversation.

From talking with other INFJs and writing my INFJ Handbook, I know thinking through past and potential conversations is something my personality type does. We tend to favor the world inside our own heads and spend plenty of time there. We’re also interested in people, though, so it makes sense that many of our inner thoughts are about how others might respond to us and what they might think about our ideas.

Conversations That Didn't Happen | marissabaker.wordpress.com — Photo Credits: “Daydreaming” by Lóránt Szabó and “Conversation” by Sharon Mollerus

But living inside your head isn’t just an INFJ thing — a preference for the inner world is one of the main ways we define introversion. With that in mind, I asked a group of introverts on Facebook if they related to this and got some interesting responses from several different personality types. I also mentioned that sometimes I forget which conversations I’ve actually had with people and which ones only took place in my head and that resonated with some but, everyone. Here’s a few of the comments I got (used with permission):

“That doesn’t sound like something limited to certain personality types, other than introversion itself. I find myself doing it from time to time. I don’t usually think about others’ feelings or intuit what they are thinking, but the conversations always play out in my head way more than they ever do in real life” (anonymous ISTJ)
“Yes, I do! It’s getting harder and harder to distinguish which is the “real” conversation. I know too well how you feel … I don’t think it’s limited to any particular personality type” (anonymous)
“Yep, all the time. It’s the really confrontational ones that will get me though. I get really angry at scenarios I have dreamed up in my head” (Charis Tippets Branson, INFJ)
“90% of the conversations I have are in my head” (anonymous)
“I do that. Though I remember if I’ve actually had those conversations because the imaginary ones were full of remarks I’d never actually say” (Mary Menard)
“I do this regularly. It’s especially helpful if it’s a hard conversation that needs to happen. The problem is that I have it all figured out and sometimes forget I didn’t actually have the conversation. Last week I told my husband, ‘So, do I really have to call and talk to her or could I just pray and ask God to tell her for me?’ He said I need to call. 😐 I wrote down what to cover or I get into listening mode and have no idea what I was planning to say” (anonymous INFJ)

Clothed in Holiness

12 March, 201611 March, 2016Marissa

“What do you think dignity’s all about?”

The directness of the inquiry did, I admit, take me rather by surprise. “It’s rather a hard thing to explain in a few words, sir,” I said. “But I suspect it comes down to not removing one’s clothing in public.” (Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day)

This quote comes from a delightful little book about a British butler looking back on his life. Much of his reminisces center around this idea of dignity. He connects dignity with “a butler’s ability not to abandon the professional being he inhabits.” A butler who cannot do this is “like a man who will, at the slightest provocation, tear off his suit and shirt and run around screaming.” In short, a good butler keeps himself covered in the role he is committed to no matter how trying the circumstances.

Clothed in Holiness | marissabaker.wordpress.com — Photo: Messianic Dance Troupe by Larry Jacobsen

I would probably not have connected this with the Bible if not for a message I heard on the same day I was taking The Remains of the Day back to the library. The Rabbi at my local Messianic congregation taught on the priestly garments and how we choose to “cover” ourselves with either good or bad actions, words, and character traits. Read more →

Evelina: A Darker Look At Courtship

7 March, 201620 March, 2018Marissa

When I first read Evelina, my observation was that Frances Burney’s style “represents a shift nearing the latter part of the 18th century from fiction as a didactic tool to fiction as a pleasurable reading experience.” While I’m good as saving my literary observations (I have copies of everything I wrote in college), I’m apparently not very good at taking my own advice. This is the first time I’ve read Evelina for pleasure rather than analysis

I chose Evelina for a reread on my Classics Club Book List, and it also fits neatly into the Classics Club’s year-long Women’s Classic Literature Event (Tweet about it with #ccwomenclassics). The first time I read Evelina was in Spring 2010 for an upper-level course on The Early British Novel. Though I didn’t hate any of the other 4 books in this course, Burney’s little epistolary novel from 1778 was by far my favorite.

It’s no wonder, then, that when our professor asked me and one other student if we’d like to read more Burney in an independent study I said “yes.” We read Cecelia (1782) and Camilla (1796) – both weighing in at a solid 900+ pages. Then we branched out into Ann Radcliffe with The Romance of the Forest. That lead me to my first undergraduate research project titled “Unmanned Heroes: 18th Century Female Writers and Male Sentimentality. That turned into a 25-page research paper titled “Biblical Answers to the 18th Century Gender Crisis” (click on the title if you’d like to read this), which led me back to reading Evelina academically.

Reading "Evelina" for #ccwomenclassics | marissabaker.wordpress.com — Me at the Denman Undergraduate Research forum in 2012

Now, 4 years later, I’m back reading Evelina and enjoying it more than ever. Frances Burney was a fantastic (and, sadly, under appreciated) writer. Though Evelina was first published anonymously, Burney never hid the fact that she was a female writer. Her novels were quite popular with the general reading public and in artistic circles even during a literary age we often think of as belonging only to “dead white man.” Her style and success paved the way for writers like Jane Austen. In fact, Austen took her title Pride and Prejudice from a scene in Burney’s second novel, Cecilia, and when Austen’s father was seeking publication for that novel he described it as “about the length of Miss Burney’s Evelina.”

Comparing Burney to Austen (another favorite writer of mine), there are clear similarities, especially in Evelina. Both writers focus on a young woman who “marries up” by the end of the novel. Both critique society and social norms with a thinly-veiled sarcastic wit. But the differences are at times even more striking than the similarities. Nowhere in Austen will you find a scene like the one in Evelina when Captain Mirvan impersonates a highwayman and drags Madam Duval into a ditch where he terrifies her for sport. And, though Austen does have her Mr. Willoughbya and Mr. Wickhams, you’ll not find any of her main characters in situations so dangerous as Evelina’s.

Throughout the course of the novel, Evelina is persecuted by a man named Lovel, hounded and even kidnapped by Sir Clement, affronted by a staring Lord (in front of his fiancee), and rudely accosted by strange men at Vauxhall. To quote an essay by Judith Newton that appeared in a 1976 edition of Modern Language Studies, there are few places Evelina can go “without being forced, intruded upon, seized, kidnapped, or in some other way violated.” Newton describes this persecution as a “woman’s fate” once she entered into the marriage market in the 1700s, and points out that Burney “is one of the few writers in the century to take the discomfort of it seriously.”

Indeed, while I’ve frequently thought I might like to visit Jane Austen’s England, Burney’s is much less appealing. It’s populated with aggressive and vulgar people, the public places are unsafe without a large party and/or male protection, and it’s painfully obvious how vulnerable and option-less women were without family and fortune to their name. But it also feels more real. Sense and Sensibility came out in 1811 and Pride and Prejudice in 1813 – a scant 33 and 35 years after Evelina. Things had changed, but not that much. Much as I love Austen, I wonder if Burney was in some ways the braver novelist for calling out her contemporary society on its darker sides.

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Bridging The Gap

5 March, 20166 March, 2016Marissa

In the beginning Adam and Eve had a face-to-face relationship with God. They they sinned, creating a gap between them and their creator that was renewed each time a human broke God’s law. God was still there, but we kept moving farther and farther away.

Behold, the Lord’s hand is not shortened, that it cannot save; nor His ear heavy, that it cannot hear. But your iniquities have separated you from your God; and your sins have hidden His face from you, so that He will not hear. (Is. 59:1-2)

Throughout the time period covered by the Old Testament books, it appears few people had a relationship with God. In every case, that relationship existed because God stepped across the gap and initiated the relationship. He called Abraham, Isaac and Jacob into covenant with Him. He spoke to Moses out of the burning bush. He chose David as king over Israel. He called the prophets individually.

Today, God also has to take the first steps in any relationship we have with Him. Jesus said, “No one comes to the Father except through Me” (John 14:6) and also, “No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws him” (John 6:44). To have a relationship with Yeshua we must be called by the Father, and to know the Father we have to go through Yeshua.

Several months ago, there was a handout at my Messianic congregation with a “Thought Of The Week” printed on the back talking about just this topic. It started out discussing Jacob’s ladder, then human attempts to bridge the gap between God and man by building things like towers. Such attempts are futile, but

The same might be said of all our religious impulses. The stars are always beyond our reach. God is far distant. Man’s best attempts to bridge the gap fail. … If we are to ascend to God, we must ascend upon a ladder that He Himself has extended to us from above.”

We can’t do anything that will make us worthy of God’s attention. All our “religious impulses” — going to church every week, singing worship songs, preaching, or even doing works like healings — aren’t going to make Jesus let us into the kingdom (Matt. 7:22-23). The only thing we can do is respond when God extends us a way to know Him.

For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, being justified freely by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God set forth as a propitiation by His blood, through faith, to demonstrate His righteousness, because in His forbearance God had passed over the sins that were previously committed (Rom. 3:23-25)

Jesus is the ladder “extended to us from above” by God the Father. He “came down from heaven” (John 6:38) to pay the price for our sins and “draw all men to” Himself (John 12:32). Because we could not reach Him, he came to us.

The Hebrew word for “bless” also means to kneel. No matter how many good works we climb up on or how hard we stretch toward heaven, we won’t reach God. Yet He blessed us by kneeling down to our level and welcoming us into a relationship through Jesus Christ.

Therefore, having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom also we have access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and rejoice in hope of the glory of God. (Rom. 5:1-2)

Because of what Jesus has done and is doing, we can reach God. Through Him, we “have access by one Spirit to the Father” (Eph. 2:18). We can come to Them with absolute confidence that They love us and want a relationship with us. They’ve proved that time and again throughout history by making covenants with people, building friendships with men like Abraham (Jas. 2:23), pleading with Their loved ones to come back, kneeling down to die in our place, and now living and walking with us.

Seeing then that we have a great High Priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold fast our confession. For we do not have a High Priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses, but was in all points tempted as we are, yet without sin. Let us therefore come boldly to the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy and find grace to help in time of need. (Heb. 4:14-16)

Jesus bridged the gap once and for all with His sacrifice that “perfected forever those who are being sanctified” (Heb. 10:14). He gave us access to God and “boldness to enter the Holiest” by making us holy (Heb. 10:19-22). “Now we are children of God” (1 John 3:2), and we can come to Him just as a child who knows their loving Father always has time to pick them up and listen to their concerns.

Myers-Briggs: Fad or Science?

29 February, 201620 March, 2018Marissa

Friends who know I blog about Myers Briggs types sometimes send me links to people critiquing the MBTI and ask what I think. The arguments in videos like “Why the Myers-Briggs test is totally meaningless” and articles such as “Goodbye to MBTI, the Fad That Won’t Die” tend to follow a similar pattern and hit the same points:

Kathryn Brigs and Isabel Briggs Myers had no formal training.
The test doesn’t allow for complex personalities or that someone can be a little bit of an extrovert and a little bit of an introvert at the same time.
Similarly, the judging-perceiving, thinking-feeling, and sensing-intuition “scales” don’t allow for people who use both.
About 50% of people who take the test twice within 5 weeks get different results.
Test fails to predict success in various jobs and doesn’t provide meaningful data.
The test remains popular because it only gives positive results. These results are vague and hard to argue with, much like astrology and pseudoscience.

Disclaimer: some of the links in this post are affiliate links. This means that, at no additional cost to you, I will receive a commission if you click on the link and make a purchase on that website.

Setting aside the first arguments for now, I think these points are a good criticism of some of the free tests going around which make people pick just between the four letter groups. None of this, however, takes into account the science behind Myers-Briggs. In fact, if the critics would bother reading Isabel Myers’ book Gifts Differing,* they would find most of their points have nothing to do with actual Myers-Briggs theory.

The Truth About Extroverts and Introverts

The video I linked above correctly states that Jung’s theory allowed for people who didn’t fit neatly into a single category. But then they say Kathryn Briggs and Isabel Myers “took Jung’s types but slightly altered the terminology and changed it so every single person was assigned only one possibility or another. You couldn’t be a little bit of an extrovert or a little bit of an introvert.”

In fact, this a complete misrepresentation of Myers-Briggs theory. Read more →

Weightier Matters

27 February, 201617 August, 2016Marissa

The scribes and Pharisees had a lot going for then. They were well-educated, well-respected, and held positions of authority in the community of believers. People thought they were important, and they were. Then this guy Jesus showed up and started condemning them for not following God correctly.

Can you imagine how this looked? Here are these men who’ve been the authority on worship tradition for years confronted by a young carpenter who just appeared out of nowhere. He didn’t even go to a good school! Worse, they know He’s right. But if they admit it, they lose their power.

weighty_matters — photo credit: Michael Coghlan “It Hangs in the Balance,” CC BY-SA

A similar thing can happen in our churches today. When leadership is focused on maintaining church tradition, there’s a danger of developing a Pharisaical attitude. A certain amount of resistance to change is needed to keep from forsaking sound doctrine, but often church tradition isn’t rooted in the Bible at all and if that’s the case it’s fair-game for reexamination. We can also, as the Pharisees did, error in emphasizing certain doctrines to the neglect of others. Read more →