People People

So my last post was April 12... and so much has happened in the past month! We had a day of recollection, celebrated with the transitional deacons who will be ordained priests this summer, attended the closing ceremonies at Boston's Eucharistic Congress for young adults and college students, and filmed interviews for the upcoming Seminarian Scholarship Dinner, and I donated platelets twice (I am a regular bi-weekly platelet donor with the Red Cross).

Continuing (to some extent) the theme of my previous post, I would like to share a little bit about what is commonly referred to as the "people person" disposition. What I understand it to refer to is people who have a natural tendency or inclination to interact with others, to be personable, both in sharing their emotions and being willing to receive others' sharing of emotions, and in all of these ways, to enter into communion with others (to use a more theological phrase).

I have found that in my formation, which is as much instructive (someone teaching or sharing their experience) as it is experiential on a personal level (the program providing opportunities to discover more about myself and about the life and work of priests and religious, especially Oblates), I have come to be more of a people-person.

This past month has been evidence of this, as I was reflecting with my spiritual director recently. I discovered in my journal that the past month has been full of various encounters and "conversations" (the word I frequently used in my journal) that have led to my realizing some insight or helping someone else to, or just receiving the consolation and gratification that comes from/with being present to someone who needed to share a troubling incident and their reactions to it or discuss their reactions to some news that we all received.

It's these moments of deeper contact among persons, and in our sharing, that the communion to which Christ called His church is realized. We have evidence of this in our innate longing for human relationships that complement and support us, and elevating those relationships by the infusion of the divine love that we are called to express to one another is how the fullest sense of communion is reached.

We were just reflecting in our Introduction to Sacred Scripture class this morning that, when we pray the psalms, our personal disposition may be quite opposed to what is expressed in the psalm (a state of joy, yet reading a psalm of lamentation or despair). This becomes, then, an opportunity to pray these psalms for those who are in a state that would be helped by what the psalm expresses, giving voice to others' longing for redemption or consolation, for justification or the return of their former prosperity. They can be an opportunity for us, when saddened or angry, to rejoice with those who are happy, celebrating their reception of grace and their blessedness. It is this kind of communion, of sharing in each other's experiences, that characterizes the heights of our life on this earth.

While I am both distant and isolated from my younger sister, Sr. Anna Sophia, who is a novice preparing to make her First Profession of Religious Vows this summer, we have a great sense of closeness based on precisely this sense of communion. Through our letters, we are able to share our experiences that most affect us, and to reassure each other of our prayers for one another. I also know that due to her daily schedule (and the difference in time zones), we actually pray Morning Prayer at the same time each day, using the same universal prayers of the Church, and in this way, also express this communion of persons.

Coming from a background of computer science (though I did pursue a minor concentration in speech/communication studies), I never quite identified with the "people person" idea. I appreciated silence, and often found it difficult to initiate conversations or really enter into the situation of my "conversation partner." I have been learning now that this is inherent to communion, and that I actually want to be that present to others in conversation and in ministry. In personality psychology, it has been identified that, on the spectrum of introversion–extroversion, a great many "quiet" people are, in fact, extroverts, in that they draw their energy and drive from others, rather than finding it within. I was surprised by this phenomenon when I took a simple survey that classified me as an extrovert, though I was not the outgoing, center-of-the-party guy that I thought exemplified that label.

I also see my own growth in this area of "people-people" in how I interact with the guys in the house, in my perceptiveness of my own relationships with each of them, and in my conscious efforts along those lines to seek opportunities to deepen the relationships that I feel are more distant. We are not machines, and we are not programmable, by many means. But I believe that the desire that has been placed in our hearts for communion with one another merits our attention to fostering growth in that communion, and that our common human dignity demands it.

In this world in which we seek so often to reduce our reality to cold, hard, facts and measurable empirical data, let us strive all the more to maintain those aspects of our experience that remain unquantifiable, that transcend the confines of the technical sciences, and that, ultimately, give real and lasting meaning to our lives.

Love the Immaculata!
Mariam cogita, Mariam invoca