Invitation to follow me in an experiment

I am choosing to engage the enneagram each day for the next nine days. The meseta is a nine day walk along a dry and boring path filled with wheat fields and little else. It is long and painstaking. Each day gives too much time to walk with yourself and wrestle with your emotions. Last week I decided to set my intentions for the meseta by engaging the enneagram. It seems right.

Each day i will consider friends who carry different energy than me and try to cherish their energy and world. I will also try to recognize this energy in me. Each day i will post a small synopsis of my walking and then offer what i am experiencing by sitting with the energy and remembering my friends who carry it. 

A brief introduction. For more, please visit Richard Rohr’s enneagram series.

 I teach the enneagram at Wts. This “voodoo” instrument has been reduced to a personality or temperament test, which drives me crazy. The intent of the enneagram is that we come to understand our patters and strategies that help us cope with an impoerfect world. Ultimately, the enneagram is movement from description of our strategies to an invitation for growth and healing. Once we know our default patters we can recognize that we actually have other options for engaging the world. I first dabbled in the enneagram in 2011-12. I brought it to Wts in 2012 and invited a friend to teach it. Now several of us utilize the enneagram in our teaching, and it is impactful for students. I teach it for teamwork and relationships, others teach it for self-awareness. Together, we have a comprehensive model to help students know what everyone else already knows about them.... 

Sometimes i want to throw out the enneagram because it has been reduced to parlor games and labeling others. This breaks my heart, and I get quit angry when we label others with numbers or say, “you are such an ...” My anger response is actually demonstration of my own enneagram energy. I want to choose differently. Instead of anger, i want to celebrate that the enneagram helps makes sense for people and gives a way of ordering the world during times when everything else seems so chaotic and uncertain. 

I believe the enneagram is rooted in the attributes of God, ala Richard Rohr. We all enter the world with a dominant attribute and offer it to the world. Sin skews our witness, so we spend our lives developing patterns and strategies to attempt to control the world in order to secure the attribute we lost. The strategies actually undo the attribute, for control is not an option in a world created by a loving God. (Sidebar: God is not a controlling God -God is not in control and to say so is to make God in our image. God has the whole world in his hands, but that is loving kindness (chesed) not control or domination. Okay, end rant).