Loving that Enneagram
If you are using the Enneagram as a fun personality test to let people know what you are like and to figure out other people, you probably haven’t grasped what the Enneagram is really about yet. Richard Rohr says, “If you don’t sense the whole thing as somehow humiliating, you haven’t yet found your number. The more humiliating it is, the more you are looking the matter right in the eye. Anyone who says, ‘It’s wonderful that I’m a three!’ is either not a three or hasn’t really understood how disastrous this pattern is. The Enneagram uncovers the games we find ourselves tangled in.”
Why is this? We’ve had a host of personality tests surface and become a trend, then be replaced by the next fun test. How is the Enneagram any different?
The primary difference to me is that the Enneagram is profoundly spiritual. It’s not social. It can be used for social understanding, but essentially the Enneagram should uncover the barriers we have constructed between us and God. Rohr and Thomas Merton say we should use it to show us our “false self” so we can let that person go and be the real person God created us to be before sin invaded.
The purpose of studying ourselves with the Enneagram is to CHANGE. It’s not to wallow in what we are. I believe God is not a number on the Enneagram. He’s in the center, the summation of all the numbers and rising above them at the same time, the combination of all of us and not us at all.
So our job is to move toward the center and upward toward God at the same time. Rohr says, “It demands a lot and is exhausting, at least when it is taught and carried out as originally intended. The Enneagram is more than an entertaining game for learning about oneself. It is concerned with change and making a turnaround, with what the religious traditions call conversion or repentance.”
“Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.” Psalm 139:23-24
Our fascination with the Enneagram is a good thing. It can help us be open to what God really wants for us. I’ll follow up on this next week.
The quotes above are from The Enneagram: A Christian Perspective. It’s one of the “Bibles” of Enneagram study and was first written in 1989, before the current Enneagram trend caught on.
