By Janet Fife

Flo is a creature of habit. Every day of the week she visits a different friend for a cuppa and a chat. Rain, shine, frost, snow – still she turns up. Covid made no difference either. Tier, 1, Tier 3, lockdown; she kept her round of visits.  Christmas Eve she felt off colour, had a cough. But she always went to her daughter and family on Christmas Day, so what difference would a cold make? Despite the objection of her son-in-law, an ambulance driver, she spent Christmas Day with the family. Boxing Day she tested positive for Covid-19. Now she has an uncertain prognosis and her whole family are in isolation, waiting to see if they too will become ill.

I think my former colleague and adopted ‘brother’ Stephen Callis might have suspected Flo of having what he called a ‘Crystalline Personality’. Stephen was a man of many parts:  Baptist minister, chaplain to the psychiatric services, experienced  therapist, professional supervisor to medics and pastors, contemplative, eccentric, and (latterly) Anglican priest. I learned so much from him. Sadly, I can’t ask Stephen what he would have made of Flo, or indeed of the pandemic. He died two years ago on New Year’s Eve.

As far as I recall, his theory of the Crystalline Personality went something like this. Most people are more or less like trees.  They bend with the wind, and if the prevailing winds are strong enough will lean with it. They adapt their growth to the conditions:  light and shade, rain and drought. If blocked in one direction, they’ll grow in another. They may drop branches here and there; the result might not be attractive or graceful – but they endure.

Others are like crystals. Whatever the variations in conditions, they remain the same. Gales may batter them, floods rise around them, but there’s no detectable difference in them. They don’t adapt to new circumstances, or to new information. They may appear strong, since they won’t be affected or deflected. They won’t change their views in the light of new data.  They can’t compromise or see another’s point of view – to do either would threaten their very being.

Readers will recognise the Crystallines from politics, where they espouse the same views and tactics they held dear 40 or 50 years ago. They are not uncommon, of course, in churches.  There has been no development in their beliefs and preferred worship style since they were a boat boy (if they are Anglo Catholic) or their conversion (if evangelical). They will resist changing anything and be threatened by attempts to do so. Being attracted by certainty, they can especially be found at the extreme wings. They are ‘keepers of the tradition’, proud of ‘proclaiming the faith once delivered to the saints’. They will ignore evidence that methods of Bible interpretation, or the Church’s teaching on baptism, marriage, and homosexuality, have differed from age to age and from place to place.

Having a crystalline personality is not a matter of age; there are young Crystallines and aged Sylvans, or tree people.  As a child and young woman I had some crystalline aspects of my own personality. I recall the feeling of being under threat when some of my ideas, theology, and practices were challenged. I can remember the exact spot – at my desk in St. Cuthbert’s, York – where I was sitting when I suddenly realised that I became dogmatic about something shortly before changing my mind. As novelist D.E. Stevenson observed, ’Being honest with oneself is often a startling experience.’

Ever since, I’ve tried to be careful to examine my thinking and motives when I feel a fit of dogmatism coming on. I have not always succeeded, but if I were not at least making the attempt I would not have been able to work in churches of a tradition different from my own background.

Though it’s a long time ago now, I remember feeling frustrated that the Bible did not contain a simple and clear set of instructions for how we should all live, rather than a collection of stories, poetry and letters that need to be interpreted and applied. Like most conservative evangelicals, I was taught the Reformation principle that the ‘plain’ understanding of the text is the correct one; and that one Bible passage interprets another. Fortunately I was  also taught to emulate the Beroean Jews, who were ‘more noble than those in Thessalonica, for they received the word with all eagerness, examining the scriptures daily to see if these things were so’ (Acts 17:10-11).  The truly Crystalline personality will find it extremely difficult to copy the Beroeans, because to do so requires an open mind; and their minds are closed. A new way of thinking, or changing standards of what is acceptable, threaten their entire being and identity. It’s an uncomfortable place to be.

They can be difficult for others to work with, too – especially those of us at the forefront of advances regarding women’s ordination, attitudes to same-sex love, and ideas about gender. We find ourselves bewildered when this issue or that, which had previously been regarded as secondary to the Gospel, suddenly becomes a test of orthodoxy. But the Crystalline genuinely believes that the whole basis of The Faith is under threat. Sylvans will be wrong-footed when a change in the flower rota provokes a long-running feud, or the youth group’s wish to introduce a worship song occasions the Choir’s Last Stand. There is no sense of proportion in a crystal:  pressure at any point is a threat to the integrity of the whole.

Needless to say, times of change and uncertainty are especially trying for Crystallines. The Covid pandemic has placed them under enormous strain, as we saw in Flo’s example. The greater the pressure to adapt her routine, the stronger her insistence in carrying on just as usual. It’s rather like the dinner party scene in Carry On Up the Khyber, where the orchestra plays on and the dinner party continues, even as the building is rocked by shellfire and chunks of the ceiling crash into the Windsor soup.

I’m not diminishing the terrible hardships being experienced by those who are losing their livelihoods or their loved ones, working under intolerable conditions, or who cannot endure the isolation. These are genuine evils. But the fury of the opposition, by some, into adaptations such as wearing masks or streaming church services online does have a crystalline flavour to it.

Is there any possibility that those with a Crystalline Personality can change? Stephen Callis thought that there was. If the pressure of circumstances becomes unbearable, or the dissonance between belief and experience too harsh, the crystal may shatter. There is a crisis:  the person may become ill physically or mentally, or both. They may question everything they’ve ever believed, and their whole way of life.  In Stephen’s view a positive outcome might be a breakdown which enables the personality to be rebuilt in a more integrated way. He had observed this to happen in some cases.

We don’t know enough about St. Paul’s early life to be sure, but I suspect he may have been a Crystalline Personality. He was rigid in his adherence to the Jewish Law and in enforcing it on others. The new teaching introduced by Jesus and his followers drove him to such a fury that he became their chief persecutor. Not content with trying to eradicate Jesus’ followers from Jerusalem, he intended to drive them out of Damascus as well.

Paul’s encounter with Christ on the Damascus Road was the cataclysmic event that shattered the rigid crystal of his personality. Thereafter he was remarkable for his adaptability. Having decided what were the first priorities of the Gospel and what was his mission, he adjusted his tactics to suit the local culture in each place he visited:

‘For though I am free with respect to all, I have made myself a slave to all, so that I might win more of them. To the Jews I became as a Jew, in order to win Jews. To those under the law I became as one under the law (though I myself am not under the law) so that I might win those under the law. To those outside the law I became as one outside the law (though I am not free from God’s law but am under Christ’s law) so that I might win those outside the law. To the weak I became weak, so that I might win the weak. I have become all things to all people, that I might by all means save some. I do it all for the sake of the gospel, so that I may share in its blessings.’ (1 Cor. 9:20, NRSV).

Naturally he is often misunderstood by those to whom such flexibility is anathema. What Paul advises for a particular group of people in a specific set of circumstances in a 1st century Roman colony becomes binding on all people for all time. It’s often possible, and an interesting exercise, to work out what principle Paul had in mind when making specific recommendations.  For all the controversies over some of Paul’s teaching, his formulations of the Christian faith still resonate down the ages and inspire people today. The man who was a brittle crystal became a mighty and fruitful tree.