Concrete vs Abstract

An interesting idea popped up this last weekend as Katie and I were hiking. Katie asked if I had ever considered visiting Israel for any reason. I should pause before going any further and say that Katie is EXTREMELY interested in all things Jewish. She's taken a trip over to Israel, participated in an outreach ministry here in the US directed towards Jews, and has a nearly constant latent desire to go head over for a long-term stay in Israel. In some sense of the word, she feels "called" to the Jewish people and since I do not share this calling we've talked about this desire she has and how it impacts our dating relationship. In fact, we've talked about it a lot. If I ever feel that things are going too well between us, I bring this up as a topic of conversation so as to muddy the waters between us and keep us both off-balance. It usually works pretty well.

Katie, on the other hand, did not bring this up question about visiting Israel for the reason of creating relational strife. She was simply curious if I had ever wanted to visit Israel for the purpose of better understanding the Bible. I thought about it a second and concluded that I had almost NO desire to visit Israel for this reason. In fact, I had always kind of looked at these spiritual vacations with some disdain or skepticism. I mean, seriously, "walk where Jesus walked"? How is that going to help me understand God or build my faith in any way? What benefit is there in visiting the land of the Bible? It's not like the culture/language/geo-political structure/economics/dirt of Israel today have much of a resemblance to those of any time in the Bible. To me, these trips have always seemed self-indulgent vacations for relatively wealthy Christians in the West.

Katie's response to my answer changed my whole perspective. In a very simple way she showed me what I was missing in all of this (aside from an attitude check). "I'm surprised by your answer but I guess I shouldn't be. You're an abstract person and I'm more concrete."

....

What? Where did that come from?

Slowly, with great deliberation, my brain started to churn on these words. Katie was, I knew, referring to a personality book we had recently finished reading together titled "Please Understand Me" by David Keirsey. Keirsey used the Myers-Briggs (aka MBTI) model to discuss personalities and people. At the beginning of the book he outlines four fundamental personality types defined by the combination of two factors: how we use tools (cooperative vs. utilitarian) and how we use words (abstract vs. concrete). Rather than trying to explain the differences here, let me show you by way of example how the concrete-vs-abstract factor plays in with Katie and I. (No promises I'm going to get this explanation to totally line-up with Keirey's actual personality theory. Have grace on me, Mark M.)

For Katie, because she is a concrete-word person, she uses and understands words in a very, well, concrete way. Maybe "visceral" or "experiential" would be good synonyms here; words have a very definite meaning that is referenced to actual, "real" things she has experienced in some way. When she thinks of "hard" she doesn't think of a concept as much as what "hard" means as a function of experience. She thinks of hard things and how they have impacted her world.

I, though, deal with words in a totally different way, abstractly. I think of the, uhmm, ideas behind the words. I think of words in terms of what they "mean" in an abstract way not so much how the words interact with reality. When I think of "hard" I'm thinking of what it means for something to be "hard", what "hard"-ness can mean in this context, or what other words I associate with "hard". To some extent, abstract-word people live in an ideal word where words are concepts and are used as such.

This difference has come up all the time between Katie and I as we try to communicate; the classic difficulty comes up when we are having a disagreement of some kind. In an attempt to make a point or illustrate more clearly how I see things I'll tacitly start taking in an analogy or metaphor. Early on, this ALWAYS threw Katie (though she's much better at following me now) because I wouldn't clearly state that I was going to speak abstractly. She would, true to her character, start interpreting my analogy/metaphor in very real, experiential, concrete, terms. In short, she was supremely confused as to the sudden change of topic and what it had to do at all with the problem under discussion.

So what does this have to do with visiting Israel? Well, for Katie and all other concrete word-users like her the words in the Bible have concrete connotations. When she reads those words she is trying to understand what is being said in terms of experiences. This means that if real, concrete experiences can be closely associated with the words used in Bible then her level of understanding increases significantly. So for all those concrete-word users (which, if I remember correctly from the book, are the vast majority of the people in the world), visiting the Biblical lands DOES bring greater meaning to the text. In Katie's words, "It helps me be able to have a picture in my mind when I'm reading. I can better understand what the Bible is talking about now that I've been there."

What a revelation this was to me! This changes my perspective completely! In exactly the same way that I could see no benefit to "walking where Jesus walked", there is tremendous benefit for people like Katie. Visiting Israel really was a faith-building venture; to see Jerusalem as it is today and visit the significant sites of the Bible (even though they aren't in many ways what is described in the Bible) provides that concrete-ness to bring the text to life. People like me don't need that experiential basis to feel like we are understanding the text, we are trying to understand the Bible in terms of this network of ideas that we associate with all the words we read. To us, the Bible IS the ideas and the text is a construction of words to communicate those ideas.

So all of this becomes another brick towards a better understanding of Katie. I can promise you, though, that I'm going to be re-learning and more fully learning it for a while. Thankfully Katie is very patient with me; I need that to understand crazy concrete-word users like her. (Seriously, words as experiences? How crazy is that?)