Cerebral Catholics and Emotional Catholics

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Fraevo63

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It seems like it’s challenging for me as an extremely emotional person of faith to interact with cerebral people of faith. I just am not not at all intellectual and have bare bones formal education of any kind. I probably expect all believers to be compassionate in their communication but some just are not… Does this make any sense to YOU?
 
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What you say makes sense. However, don’t forget that it takes all sorts of people to make the world go around. Someone whose language is academic or matter of fact is not necessarily lacking compassion.
 
It does make sense. But it is nothing to worry about. You will meet people at all different points in their faith journey. As a line from a popular piece back in the 70s said, “there will always be greater and lesser persons than yourself.” There will always be people that know and understand more, or less than us. And that’s fine. No one should look down upon people that know less. Knowing less does not necessarily mean lacks faith. Often on CAF, there will be people discussing things that are way above my pay grade. Sometimes, I can learn, sometimes, my brain glazes over and I move to another thread. Try not to let it bother you. We are all at different places, and none is better than another.
 
I know exactly what you’re talking about, but far from seeing it as a source of tension, I view it more as a place where we can all compliment one another. I’ve seen this in my own life. I’m one of those “cerebral Catholics.” I come by it honestly. My first real interest in the faith was mostly intellectual–I didn’t really care much about it until I started reading and studying in about the ninth grade, mostly so I could argue with the anti-Catholics I went to school with (some of whom were teachers…). So my approach to the faith was always strongly intellectual and even logical; I get more of a “spiritual high” so to speak from reading proofs for the existence of God than I do from devotional books. To this day, I much prefer liturgical, structured prayer, and am mortified when I am placed on the spot in family get-togethers and asked to say a spontaneous prayer. Even my spontaneous prayers sound like glued-together snippets of liturgical prayers.

But that’s not to say that’s all there is to my own life. I am very blessed to have a dear friend who has a nearly opposite approach to faith. Her faith has always been a very personal, very conversational matter, with a deep intimacy with Jesus. Where my faith is more logical and intellectual, hers depends more on instinct and feeling and movements of the soul like that. In this way, we have shared greatly with one another–I find myself more open to the more instinctive, intuitive kind of prayer and contemplation as a result of many of our conversations, and she I know has benefited from having some more structure and definition to certain things, having theological background to help fill out understanding of things she didn’t quite grasp otherwise. So far from being opposed, being “cerebral” or being “emotional” can actually be complementary approaches.

For more on this phenomenon, I’m going to recommend that you watch The Lego Movie. No joke. It’s a genius bit of writing because instead of the usual Hollywood trope of a person who leads a dull, boring existence being led to something more exciting by someone who walks on the wild side (which is both unrealistic and nearly always very messy in reality), it is rather about how two people with very different approaches to life (one who follows the rules and one who is creative and spontaneous, i.e. your “cerebral” and “emotional” categories) come together to compliment one another.

-Fr ACEGC
 
This doesn’t just relate to Catholics but to all people in the world in general.
In my experience, those who are more “cerebral” and those who are more “emotional” often have difficulty communicating because of their very different styles of understanding and processing the world and how they go about discussing it.

Certainly we should all try to be charitable and understanding of each other. For you as an emotional person, that might mean accepting that the cerebral person is looking for some different kind of response that isn’t emotional, and that when they respond with some remark that seems cold or lacks understanding, they don’t mean it personally directed at you, it’s just how they think. Pray for them and move on. Or even just tell them, “I’m a very emotional person and that is how I see the world and communicate. I am very much based on feelings, not on logical thought. I don’t think like you do.”

No need to get into all the business about education levels, etc. There are some highly educated people who are still so emotional I can’t deal with them.
 
Well nobody is fully rational logical or fully emotional even when they say they are. Also, such things can change in time. I know people who used to be emotional to the point of crying over the smallest difficulty who then became serene and intellectual and others who were stone cold rational and later became a walking bundle of emotions.
 
Interesting. You and me are very similar in our approach to the faith. I am very logical and love reading on apologetics to defend the faith through logic and philosophy. I don’t really get emotional much and my relationship with our Lord is very private except when I find opportunities to share the faith and when I do I approach it logically.
 
I have been given too many visions and also prelets not to think that God is at peace with emotional nature. Whenever I try to reason or do apologetics people are not convinced some even bite deeper than I can take. So I can either be the wanna-be bitten cerebral Christian and take whips from all sides or… pray in private for those I wish I could convince.
My greatest respect is for the Martyrs, who faced the palms and crumbled underneath it. So in my envisioned future I will be the dysfunctional cerebral who cannot handle her emotional side anymore even if this puts me in conflict with my Creator.
 
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It depends on how you think of the idea of being compassionate in communication. Some people are very rational minded and not particularly expressive of emotion. There are differences in temperament. Every one is different.

We all have different gifts and personalities.
 
Tis_Bearself said:
No need to get into all the business about education levels, etc. There are some highly educated people who are still so emotional I can’t deal with them.
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Yes, I’ve seen this over and over. The tension and misunderstandings can be the same between a less educated person who is of the cerebral type, and a highly educated, well-informed person who is more emotional. And it’s not just about religion. It’s more general than that.
 
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edward_george1 said:
Even my spontaneous prayers sound like glued-together snippets of liturgical prayers.
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LOL. 😃

“Our Father, who art in the Lord, in the name of the Father, and with your spirit, I believe in one.”
 
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edward_george1 said:
To this day, I much prefer liturgical, structured prayer, and am mortified when I am placed on the spot in family get-togethers and asked to say a spontaneous prayer. Even my spontaneous prayers sound like glued-together snippets of liturgical prayers.
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Father, Eastern Orthodoxy salutes you. Sound like you pray perfectly. No imagination allowed.
 
Father salutes back with a very worn (from pocket carry, less so from use) prayer rope and a marked up copy of the Philokalia. I don’t last twelve pages in The Imitation, but I can stay lost in Evagrius and John of Karpathos for weeks.
 
That is the beauty of the Catholic faith, it reaches each of us, where we are.

One can read very emotional devotion from Saints like St Louis de Montefort “True Devotion To Mary” or they can read very intellectual things like the Summa, and all things in between.

Some of us like reading the Old Testament books of law while others love the poetry of the Psalms.

Beautiful!
 
If you think saying a prayer at a family gathering was “fun”, try doing a spontaneous prayer at a Thanksgiving dinner where everyone else is LDS… 😜
 
edward_george1 said:
I’m one of those “cerebral Catholics.” I come by it honestly.
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A good priest friend of mine uses me as an example when he speaks.

When I was in RCIA (back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and we did not have much of an internet), they gave us one of those big, tan colored copies of the Catechism of the Catholic Church. I promptly read it.

I also loved the World Book as a child and arrival of the annual update “Yearbook” was more anticipated than Christmas 🙂
 
We are all made differently and struggle to communicate. Just remember than many of us academic/cerebral/intellectual types can have difficulties with emotional types. I am not an emotional person but that doesn’t mean in the least that I lack compassion.
 
I am of the cerebral type - which does not mean I have no emotions, but tend to the “information” side. The only time I have a problem with the emotional types is when I come across one going down the wrong path, and their emotions are so strong that they don’t want to hear anything else (ordaining women being one of those topics that facts seem not to matter - and men holding that opinion can be just as difficult to speak with; I am not calling out women).

I recently had the privilege of watching a series of videos by Brant Pitre on the Jewish Roots of the Eucharist. He didn’t really touch on anything in the Old Testament that I had not heard; but I had never heard it presented that way. Awesome! It gets beyond relating to the Eucharist in dry philosophical terms, and my undergraduate degree was Philosophy.
 
I know someone who is highly emotional, this person suffers extreme joy and extreme pain, it’s very hard to watch. I have also known one or two others who seem to have become completely detached from their emotions, they haven’t been happy or unhappy seemingly.

It would be nice to be somewhere between those two positions, express emotion when appropriate and be able to be controlled when the situation requires it. As always, a compromise might be best.
 
My great uncle, not Catholic but a voracious reader, had one of those tan copies of the Catechism. It became mine after his passing, and about seven or eight years later when I was in high school, it was in my bookbag every day and I would read it constantly. The cover is about gone from it now.

And I always loved visiting my Granny’s house. She had a complete set of World Books from the late 1960s and the Year Books for about a decade and a half around that time.
 
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