Rev. Edmund Robinson
Unitarian Universalist Church of Wakefield
February 13, 2000

This is a subject which until recently we shied away from discussing in public, and indeed, who would be so bold as to talk about shyness today were it not for the pioneering work of that great radio evangelist Garrison Keillor, who is still selling his mythical Powder Milk Biscuits on the claim that they give shy persons the strength to get up and do what needs to be done. Maybe some of the words I say here today can be our Powder Milk Biscuits.

Now my tongue is only partly in my cheek as I say this. I have said before that this church has an image of itself as a collection of shy people, and I didn't want to add to that image because the myth can become self-fulfilling. I think shyness comes and goes for all of us in different situations, it's not a fixed characteristic for any of us, but it's a trait which comes to the fore in particular situations.

An article in Psychology Today estimates that 48% of the American people are shy. I count myself as one of them, in certain situations. This may come as a surprise to you, because you see me up here talking and singing and carrying on, but all of these activities are really attempts to force myself to overcome my fear of people.

I can remember a time when I was about 13 and was coming back from a school trip to Eastern North Carolina and I flew across that state to meet my parents at Kanuga, an Episcopal camp and conference center in the Western North Carolina. I got to the camp from the airport OK, but my parents were delayed, and I remember sitting for 4 hours waiting for them and missing at least one meal because I was too shy to ask for it.

Shyness for me and for most of us shy people is a personality trait, but for some of us it is more serious. There are people who can't walk into a room full of people without getting sweaty palms and stomach palpitations. This type of extreme shyness is called social phobia, and like a lot pf psychological syndromes, now that it ias been identified they are discovering that it is more widespread than previously thought, perhaps as much as 13% of the population.

What, exactly, is shyness? I think it needs to be distinguished from being introverted, which I also am, slightly. To find the authoritative answer, of course, I turned to the Internet, where the website shyness.com led me to the Encyclopedia of Mental Health, which said this:

Research has distinguished shyness from introversion, although they are typically related. Introverts simply prefer solitary to social activities but do not fear social encounters as do the shy, while extroverts prefer social to solitary activities. Although the majority of shy are introverted, shy extroverts are found in many behavioral settings. They are privately shy and publicly outgoing. They have the requisite social skills and can carry them out flawlessly in highly structured, scripted situations where everyone is playing prescribed roles and there is little room for spontaneity. However, their basic anxieties about being found personally unacceptable, if anyone discovered their "real self," emerge in intimate encounters or other situations where control must be shared or is irrelevant, or wherever the situation is ambiguous in terms of social demands and expectations.

Now there's nothing wrong with being shy per se and there's nothing wrong with being introverted. But shyness can limit us in some of the things we want to do.

We shy people have troubles at all times of year, but Valentine's Day is particularly hard if you're both shy and alone. The entire culture seems determined to tell us how alone we are. As it happens, my own aloneness today is only a temporary thing: if TWA and Logan airport cooperate, my fiancée will come back from her Oklahoma gig tonight. But in the year between partners I experienced Valentines day as an almost unbearable reminder of my lack of intimacy with anyone. More on that later.

Now shyness applies to any social situation, but we shy people are more stymied in the unfamiliar than the familiar, and we are most stymied when we are called on to try for intimacy, whether physical or emotional. Perhaps this is why I didn't attempt to kiss Jacqueline until the fifth date.

Back when I was a teenager, the mechanism of choice for pairing people up was the social ordeal known as dating. In those days, it was always the guy who would call up the girl to ask her out. I don't know which had it worse; I'm sure it was excruciating to be a girl waiting for the phone to ring, but what I remember is the sweaty palms I would get just trying to get up enough courage to make the call. I think in my kids generation the idea of dating waned somewhat and people hung out in groups a lot more. Perhaps that's healthier.

But I discovered when I was on my own in 1997 that it's just as terrifying to date at 50 as it was at 15. One of the first real dates I had as a single man was a blind date on Valentine's Day that year, arranged by a friend of mine. I showed up with a rose and candy and all kinds of expectations, and what I got was a limp handshake and an evening of polite conversation and not very good food. But I felt like I had passed some kind of test just doing it.

Shyness fundamentally springs from self-awareness. Now self-awareness is generally a good thing. It is a value much prized by certain religious systems, especially Buddhism. As far as I'm concerned, one can never be too self-aware.

But the self awareness of the shy person, the self-awareness which inhibits us from social interaction, has these characteristics: it is judgmental, it is often arrogant, it is anxious, and it neglects fellow-feeling. And this is why it's worth preaching about in church. I'm not Ann Landers and not offering advice to the lovelorn. You come in here today in all states of partnerdom, some firmly hitched, some recently unhitched or in the process, some looking for Mr. or Ms. Right, some licking your wounds, some determinedly single. I have neither any right nor any desire to tell you that you ought to engage in romantic love or not to engage in it, and it doesn't really matter what I say anyhow – love is much more powerful than preaching.

The crucial religious point to remember is that romantic love is only a part of the total package called love, and that package is inextricably intertwined – don't you love that phrase? – with our humanness. We can make a decision, or circumstances can decide for us, that we will not take a partner, and some of us can live and live well as single people.

But we don't have a choice about living without love altogether, for that is not living, it is death.

Shy people are not shy because they don't like people, or don't want relationship with people. I know that when I am in a crowd by myself at a restaurant or on the subway I often am overcome with envy for those who are in couples and groups. I fantasize that they are having the most interesting and enjoyable conversations, and I am excluded. In fact, they may be exchanging recipes for tuna casserole or telling long boring stories about their plumbing leaks, but as a shy person I live in the perpetual fear that other people are having more fun than me.

No, we aren't misanthropes. We want to be in relationship, we want some kind of connection, we just don't seem to be very good about going to get it. And this is where it might be helpful if I try to unpack my own ideas about shyness a little to see how its debilitating and inhibiting effects might be lessened. A moment ago, I gave you a list of four features of the self-awareness of shy persons, generated not by the experts but from my own experience informed by a little reading. Here they are: it is judgmental, it is or can be arrogant, it is anxious, and it ignores fellow-feeling.

First, the self-awareness of us shy people is judgmental. This is one of the things which distinguishes it from the self-awareness that is the goal of Buddhist meditation. When I am in a situation where my flight-or-fight juices start pumping, say a gathering of people I perceive as powerful or higher status, a censor comes down and sits right on my tongue. I will formulate things to say that might be appropriate, that might give me some entree into the social situation, and that censor says, nope, too stupid. So I try something else. If it is a really anxiety-producing situation, I might never get anything past the censor.

The date, or the first approach between potential romantic partners is the very paradigm of this kind of situation. You might have seen Woody Allen's movie Annie Hall back in the 70's which beautifully illustrates this censor, for the film shows the couple on their first encounter both in what they are saying to each other and in what they're thinking about what they're saying. And what they're thinking is mostly judgmental things like, "Boy that's stupid," "What a trite thing to say." The internal reviewer hands out a lot more pan than praise.

The good news is that in order to control the judgmentalism, we don't have to deal with anyone but ourselves. We can learn to stop judging ourselves so critically. Part of this is to stop judging others so critically. As Jesus said, judge not that you be not judged. Part of the discipline of mindfulness is to let go of the judgmental thoughts we have about everything but particularly about ourselves.

The second feature of the shy person's self awareness is the converse of this judgmentalism – in some of us, it tends towards the arrogant. As one of the informants in the Psychology Today article put it:

"I have a strong hate of most people. I also have quite a superiority complex. I see so much stupidity and ignorance in the world that I feel superior to virtually everybody out there. I'm trying not to, but it's hard."

A conviction that we ourselves are better than everyone else, that other people are boring and not worth getting to know, becomes the basis for a variety of self-defeating social behaviors. The attitude gets transmitted and makes people want to shun us, which further increases our isolation. In the extreme, this leads the vulnerable among us to totally dissociate themselves from society and seek revenge by shooting up the high school.

The third characteristic of the self-awareness of the shy person is that it is anxious. Anxiety stems form the fear that this social situation will get the best of us, will defeat us again just as the last one did.

In some situations our well-being really is on the line, but in others we become the prisoner of our own inflated expectations. The Valentine's Day date that I described earlier might have gone better if I hadn't brought the flowers and candy on the first date, if I hadn't had and expressed such high expectations.

Our high expectations lead us to compare ourselves with the most popular or successful people in our social situation, not with the average. I want to be having as much fun as the people over there are having, the people whose laughter just attracted my attention, and I'll feel bad if I don't, even though the other 50 people in this restaurant aren't laughing either.

Sometimes our high expectations lead us to get stuck on someone who is not realistically available. Let me give you an incident which I just recalled this week. When I was 14, my parents sent me off to an all-male boarding school, after two years of a public junior high. Though I had not started dating by that time, I had several female friends from junior high.

But the picture that I took with me to prep school and put on my dresser was not of the girls I actually knew well, but a candid I had taken of Beth, a girl who hardly knew my name, was not particularly bright, but was popular and dating and looked like an adolescent version of Jacqueline Kennedy. I am quite sure that I never wrote or received a letter from this person, and I look back from 37 years later in wonderment. Was I trying to pass her off to my roommates as my girlfriend? Or was I attracted to her because I knew she would never give me the time of day? It is certain that I would never have had the nerve to actually ask her out, so what was her picture doing on my dresser? Ah the mysteries of the heart!

The fourth aspect of the self-awareness of shy people is that it is sometimes lacking in fellow feeling. What I mean by fellow-feeling is the perception that the other person is "like me." It's like we shy people have some kind of reflective coating on the inside and all we can see is ourselves and this prevents us from realizing that the other is pretty much a person as are we.

Shyness can be seen as a mild form of shame. In 1998, I did a summer of Clinical Pastoral Education, or CPE, at Beth Israel-Deaconess under Rev. Charles Kessler, a Methodist minister. Charlie used to tell us you have to distinguish shame from guilt. Guilt is what a person feels about a particular action he or she has taken; shame is what they feel just from being in the world. Guilt says "why did I do that thing?" Shame asks, "What's wrong with me?" The way out of guilt is forgiveness by the person, but the way out of shame is acceptance.

We shy people carry this little edge of shame around with us at all times, and the great moments, at least for me, are when I break through that shame and realize that the person I'm dealing with has problems just like me.

In the romantic realm, we come to believe from puberty onward that the opposite sex is a different order of being. In fact, while there are across-the-board differences between men and women, our similarities far outweigh our differences. Yet it is so hard to think of someone in whom we have romantic or sexual interest as "like me."

This is particularly true as our culture more and more encourages and facilitates us to have romantic and sexual interest in people who we will never know. We fall in love with movie stars, rock stars, models, political figures. We put their pictures above our desks or in our lockers for a lift. They are safe, because the pictures don't talk back and we can get a kind of satisfaction without risking much. But it is not a very good model for overcoming shyness.

One arena which is almost the converse of the pinup/fan interaction is the anonymous chat room on the Internet. Here you don't have pictures, but you don't have real names either. Here we can exchange the most outrageous and personal information without any idea of whether what we're getting from the other person is genuine or not.

This anonymous chat is intimacy of a sort, but it isn't very satisfying, and it isn't very good for leading us out of shyness. What we shy people need is to force ourselves to more social interaction, because we need to learn the skills of effective interaction. The chat room lacks the human face, the human voice, the pheromones and clues and nuances that guide face-to-face interaction. But there is more important ingredient missing. The conversation in the chat room lacks responsibility.

Responsible social interaction takes into account that actions and words may have consequences, and part of any good relationship is the willingness to stick around to bear those consequences. This idea follows from the notion that the other with whom I'm dealing is a person "like me." Ethically, it's the application of the good old Golden Rule. If this relationship, whether romantic, professional, or merely amicable, is going to get anywhere, I'd better treat you like I want to be treated.

So the message I have for us shy people is that it shyness is not a fatal affliction, and there's nothing wrong with being shy. Maybe we need to craft a new beatitude, Blessed are the shy, because if everyone was in your face all the time, you'd get no peace. But to the extent that shyness gets in the way of love, romantic or otherwise, we are right to be concerned about it. The good news is that for most of us, we can work on it and overcome its life-limiting and love-limiting quality.

You can keep your Powder Milk Biscuits, Mr. Keillor. Shy people don't need strength – we've got enough of that. What we need is confidence, the feeling that we are good enough in ourselves and the person or people we are trying to connect with are bascially like us. Confidence is a good old Universalist word. Albert Ziegler, minister of this church, wrote "Universalism redeemed certainty as confidence, confidence in the good nature of man [sic] as the product of a loving, all-powerful God."

God loves you. Remember that in your shyness. God also loves the person you're trying to connect with. If you can find the God in you and find the God in the other person, you can overcome your shyness.

We must remember this fact about love: it only works if you give it away. I will close with a little meditation on love from Richard Gilbert, the UU minister in Rochester, NY.

Loneliness is our common fate.
There is no escape.
But out of that lonelienes comes our salvation,
For we love out of fear of being alone.
As long as human beings people the earth,
We can be assured
That in our loneliness
There is also love –
Deep, infinite love,
Waiting to be tapped,
To water the barren brown lawn of our loneliness –
Love which shrivels if kept to the self,
Which flourishes only if it is given away.
I need you.
You need me.
I know it.
You know it.
What are we waiting for?

Amen.