Concretely (or is it Abstractly?) Happy

Just after reading Kabloona's comment on my kafuffle post this morning (after a wonderful School of Community experience) I was off to Mass. The homilist was one of the newer faces on campus, so I cannot credit the correct Father by name, but it was a case where his words made me so happy (after I thought about them at least) that I wanted to jump up and down and go Wheeeee!

He was talking about Peter's question to Jesus about just how many times we are expected to forgive another, and Jesus' response with a parable. With minor paraphrasical liberties, his words were basically this:

You will remember that Jesus, in yesterday's gospel, laid out this paradigm of what we are to do when someone sins against us. We are to go to them, then take others if the first approach does not bring reunification, etc. Now, Peter, being a concrete thinker, asks Jesus a concrete question. "Just how often are we supposed to do this?" Questions that can be answered with numbers appeal to some people, because then you know exactly what to do to replicate the answer. (Wait! Here comes my happy part.) But Jesus directed Peter away from this desire for a mere concrete answer towards a more abstract answer about forgiveness by telling this parable.

Yes!!! See, concrete answers are for questions like "what is 2+2?". Abstract answers are to questions like "what is love, and how do you do it?" Or at least that's how my brain hears it. And I know what two plus two equals, but to be honest I'm not all that interested. But my life hinges on the question of what love is and how I do it. Oh, I know that I must attend to what is real, meaning what is physical in this world. But what is conceptual is often more real to me than things I can touch, and scads more meaningful.

I am really very indebted to the Myers-Briggs people. The first time I took that assessment I was amazed/relieved to know that my general personality type (introverted intuitive) is the least frequent in our culture (about 10%). Just recently I found my husband's test results from a class he once took, and it noted that if a certain number registers very low, then it could flip either way. This could explain why my previously extremely low "feeling" numbers have changed to "thinking" numbers in recent years. And that particular configuration (INTP) puts me in company with about 1% of females of the world.

And that's ok. Sometimes I just need to really puzzle about how one does life -- especially when I consider what other people tell me about how they do life.

But to go back where I started, I am feeling so happy over this funny little question now.