While I'm not surprised by it, I've only recently been able to find the value in it. Thankfully, academia is a collection of introverts. My colleague and friend, Joy Allen, who is a rare extrovert in our department, once remarked that the extroverts needed to plan the excruciating periods of networking at conferences to balance out the nominal amounts of social time they would get normally. You would imagine then, that postgraduate work would be windfall.
Postgraduate work is inherently lonely. The premise that you, alone, are adding a unique contribution to research often means that you are alone. It's the combination of long hours in your own head, driven by your own sense of urgency and pressure to add a small, and often rather insignificant, 100k works to the collective knowledge of the world.
It can be hell, and I'm never surprised at the number of studies published about the correlation between postgraduate work and mental illness, particularly depression and anxiety. The way the academy is designed is to drive us out of community. Worse, we are the ones behind the wheel driving ourselves into seclusion.
It is within this context I've had an epiphany- I am in every regard an introvert, yet I am also created to be part of a community.
This is the first point in my life when I've realized how hard it is to find an embodied community. We are often like a fleet of ships, loosely connected in a forward move, but not anchored to one another. University was a time when we lived together. We were all trying out new personas and activities- often with the hope and success of finding a few other weirdos to be friends with. The same could be said of the years preceding university. We all play adults and find one another. I'm grateful for the people I found during that time and continue to be in community with, even now. In seminary, we were guided to finding community. While my covenant group epically failed at materializing, I could find those on the fringe and band together. We all shared the same basic curriculum, working to the same goal, idealistic about leaving the seminary walls and carrying the hope and love of God into the world.
But that's not postgraduate work, and I've recently realized how dis-embodied my community here feels at times. Which is not to say that I don't have friends here. Rather, that many of my friendships feel rather superficial at times. There's only a handful of people who would notice my absence, and honestly that could probably be said of me as well. We make excuses for our absences because of work, but I think the more realistic problem is that we've been set up to resist being community with one another because in a limited world of academic or pastoral postings, we all know that those most close to our research are also our competitors. It's easier to be close to those working on projects radically different from ours, but it just complicates our loneliness because we are still, then, alone in our heads with our ideas.
Truett made me appreciate that the academy is important for the church.
Aberdeen has made me appreciate how needed the church is for the academy.
If we are called by God, then we are called into community- and into embodied and vulnerable communities at that. It's my sneaking suspicion that Americans have messed this up profoundly. I've watched the election coverage and (along with many other things to be horrified at) I find myself baffled that evangelic Christians in particular are so polarized. Surely, the opposite should be true. We should be questioning those loud voices that pierce our communities.
What happened to quiet voices that draw us together?
My culture has shaped me to believe that my political beliefs define who I am and who I should be community with. And, to be honest, my introvert default is to believe that. Forming community is hard enough for me, without the added benefit of having disagreements about things that seem so important.But my experience in genuine, embodied communities has taught me differently. There can be fellowship with those across the aisle who are in the same pew.
I find it so easy to dismiss people who believe radically differently than me online, and frustratingly easy to form those bonds of community in person.
I am an introvert created for community. I am a solitary person who enjoys physically being around people in quiet. I am a liberal who is friends with conservatives. I am an American who rejects the belief that individualism is the hallmark of freedom and that voices breaking down community are ushering in the American dream.
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