Orienting New Church Members.

I am frustrated with the traditional models of orienting and incorporating new members in churches.  What we normally do is bring people on board with a review of basic Christian doctrine and an introduction to the life, people, workings, and mission of the local congregation.  All of which is fine and nice, but doesn’t really get to the heart of what we’re about in terms of transformation, repentance, and growth in the Spirit.

The old language, which talked a lot about sin, has become bankrupt and counter-productive.  I can’t imagine starting a new member or confirmation class these days with: “First of all, you have to admit you are a terrible sinner deserving of God’s condemnation.”  It would take so many hours of backpedaling to unpack that requirement that all authenticity and integrity would be lost.  The words, especially the word “sin,” have been loaded up with so much negative, self-hating, self-flagellating, oppressive, guilt-ridden, shame-inducing, condemning baggage as to be useless.  

How might we convey the important fact that we live normally in a situation of lies, delusion, ignorance, and blindness?  How do we express the idea that the world we think we live in is not the real world?  How do we admit our brokenness and move towards the realization  that it doesn’t have to be this way?  How do we do it in such a way that it does not come off as self-hatred?  

The language of the Enneagram does this very effectively.  Starting with the Enneagram of Personality, learning one’s type and its characteristics is an awakening experience in itself.  It identifies the ways our personality falls short, misleads us, and is a result of fear.  Our personality structure keeps us from opening into more reciprocal and mutually beneficial  relationships.  Identifying things like the “passion” of each type begins to help us see that we are not what we can be, but are being held back by a defective and deficient way of seeing ourselves and others.  In other words, it reveals to us our sinfulness without using such an overloaded, overused, misused, and often abusive word.

And it gives us a pathway of what Christians would traditionally call repentance (without using that loaded word either).  The discipline of “catching ourselves in the act,” and moving into the higher, healthier levels of our type, also opens us to awareness of our connection to Essence.  

The Enneagram gives us a tool enabling us to recognize the gap between our ego-centric, personality-driven selves, and our Essence-selves.  Then it begins to give us the means by which we may move from slavery to one, to liberation in the other.  The Enneagram uses different and neutral language to a point, and then offers a way to recover some of what Christianity teaches, without having to rely on the no-longer-understood older terminology.

The Way of Jesus is the bridge we offer over this gap.  Through discipleship and repentance we become more compassionate, kind, forgiving, honest, generous, humble, and open.  We learn to perceive from a more inclusive perspective.  We are able to detach from the destructive, consuming path of anger, fear, and shame.   

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The Political Meaning of the Enneagram.

The ancient and basic spiritual dictum, “as above, so below,” means that heaven and earth reflect each other in such a way that what happens in one is analogous to what happens in the other.  Jesus expresses this as a hope when he has his disciples pray, “on earth as it is in heaven.”  While this made more visual sense to ancient people, I am suggesting that it is more intelligible to post-Modern people if we talk about it as, “as within, so without.”  That is, what is going on in our interior life is directly expressed and reflected in the way we live our lives in the world.  

The psychological and the political are inherently connected to each other.

The Enneagram, in its use as a tool for spiritual growth through knowledge of personality types, helps us address imbalances and disorder in our inner life.  This is especially the case in the Riso-Hudson school, which pays a lot of attention to levels of health.  The levels show the degree to which we are controlled by our personality-driven ego.  The way to health is to bring the ego into balance and perspective, allowing one’s essence to emerge.  Essence is the divine Light within us, by which we are connected to all creation and its Creator.  Our essence is who we truly and most deeply are; as distinct from our superficial ego and its expression in personality. 

If ego and personality are in defense-mode, essence embraces and engages.  If ego and personality are about fear, essence demonstrates love.  If ego and personality are about either-or, building walls, making distinctions, and exclusion, essence is about both-and, breaking boundaries, and inclusion.  If ego and personality are habitually dualistic, essence is integral and non-dual.

Our psychology always manifests in our politics.  

That is, the way we personally think and feel about ourselves and our relationship to the world will be shown in the way we act in the world and in the kind of structures we project into the world for our own security.  If our inner lives are crippled by fear, shame, and anger, then these qualities will be what we express in our own behavior, and expect and therefore defend against from others.  Fear, shame, and anger manifest in the behaviors classically listed as “deadly sins,” which in the Enneagram system are the nine “passions.” 

If in our interior existence we crave and follow the orders of one particular element which we have allowed to take charge — our personality-driven ego — then we will also tend to live in the world in such a way that generates, looks up to, follows, and defends the principle of one leader.  The dictatorship of the ego in our souls is expressed by our placing dictators into power in the world.  Thus the Fuehrerprinzip, or “leader principle” of Nazi Germany, which was a particularly brazen and toxic version of the general human desire for “strong leadership.”

Just as we psychologically identify with our personality-driven ego, we politically identify with whatever seems best to protect us, rationalizing our fear, anger, and shame, and funding our passions.  In practice this invariably means a propping up of the powerful, the wealthy, the connected, the educated, and the privileged; in other words, the establishment.  Society becomes a macrocosm of a self dominated by one ego-perspective, which is put in charge.  This is why we can postulate about cultures as relating to particular personality types, as in “America is a Three culture,” or “Japan is a Six culture.”  One point-of-view is allowed to ascend into dominance in a society, analogous to the way one perspective — personality-driven ego/Type — comes to dominate the person.

The response to this domination system in society is analogous to the response to the domination system in the person.  Step One is awareness.  Like an addict, we have to realize that our common life has become unmanageable.  We have to ask ourselves Dr. Phil’s infamous question: “How is that working out for you?”  How is being dominated by the achiever class working out for us, “us” being the body as a whole, most of whom are in the servant-worker class?  People have to wake up to the damage being done to themselves by the system, and start to see it as it is: an unhealthy regime we projected originally for good reasons, but which now separates us from the true freedom of our essence.  

We see this happening in America when people read a book like Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, and realize that Columbus was a monster, the Founders were slave-holders, and the ruling class has consistently committed unspeakable crimes.  We then engage in something like a 12-Step process to move beyond oppressive and toxic social structures.  

Unfortunately, most revolutionary processes like this are unable to break free of the gravity of ego, and devolve into Pete Townsend’s “meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”  And we end up with the same basic regime but with a different segment of the establishment promoted to leadership.  

But in health, 

as we become more present and aware of our essence, 

what we start slowly moving towards 

is a leaderless, egalitarian, inclusive, distributed, 

networked, decentralized, integrated society 

where power is not allowed to congeal in one class let alone one individual, 

where decisions are made by balancing different interests for the good of the whole.  

We move towards flat, circular gatherings of reciprocity and exchange, 

and away from top-down, pyramidal, exclusive, command-and-control structures.

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Spirituality for the Nones and the Dones.

Much has been made of the recent polling indicating that the numbers of Americans claiming to have no religious affiliation are increasing dramatically.  Sometimes we call these folks the “spiritual but not religious,” meaning that they do claim to have a spiritual dimension to their lives but don’t find it fed in traditional religious institutions.  Sometimes we refer to these groups as either “nones,” indicating the box they check off when asked about religion, or the “dones,” which are people who were once religiously active but who have now given it up.

I propose the Enneagram as a way forward that does offer a pathway for spiritual growth without a lot of the institutional/credal baggage. 

The entry to the Enneagram for many people is as a personality inventory tool in which nine different personality types are identified, each with distinct characteristics.  This system is immensely helpful as a first step in spiritual development because it sheds so much self-knowledge and self-awareness.  Once we bring into consciousness the yawning chasm that persists between our true essence and our standard ego-identity that is, once we realize the difference between who we think are and who we we truly are, we can begin to grow.  It is the tension and yearning involved in becoming aware of this distinction that generates the energy to transform spiritually.

Spiritual growth means a kind of expansion, leaving behind — but including — the small, conditioned, fearful, and narrow self of our personality, and at the same time opening to the ever deeper, higher and wider perspective of the true Self.  It has to do with moving through and past our fears, into a realm of increasing acceptance and awareness.  

For each type this happens differently, mainly because the fear crippling each type is manifested in different ways.  Each type gets stuck in a particular passion which distorts its perception of reality and conditions our reaction to events.  For gut types (8, 9, 1) this primal fear is expressed as anger, for heart types (2, 3, 4) it exudes shame, and for head types (5, 6, 7) the fear is compounded.  Then each type has its own particular mode of reactivity: 8 - lust, 9 - sloth, 1 - resentment, 2 - pride, 3 - deceit, 4 - envy, 5 - avarice, 6 - , and 7 - gluttony.

Once the person becomes aware of what is blocking and constricting them, they are able to turn and act otherwise.  Not that this is as simple as it sounds.  Usually simply being cognitively aware of these patterns does not automatically change behavior or ways of thinking.  In fact, this movement from the closed, small, narrow, limited, and fearful self into the greater Self of essence, is basically the whole journey.

At first this is done by simply becoming the best and most healthy person we can be, whatever our type.  This involves attention to where we find ourselves on the different levels of health.  We continually “catch” ourselves acting out of our fear and exhibiting characteristics of falling into unhealthy levels, and are thus empowered to change and reverse our direction.  Often this takes remarkable strength and courage, since it means breaking with life-long patterns and habits.  In the beginning we are usually quite inept at it.  But with time and practice, it is possible to “not go there” with respect to unhealthy and destructive behaviors.

The more healthy we become the more we start integrating the best qualities of the other types, in the order of the inner lines of the Enneagram symbol.  Our self-identification thus broadens and becomes more widely inclusive.  As Rumi said, “The breadth of our perception determines the effectiveness of our action.”  The higher we go up the scale of health, the farther we can see, therefore enabling wiser and better informed actions.

A lot of this is what the great religions have always talked about, using different symbols and stories.  The Enneagram itself emerges out of, or draws from, several spiritual traditions including Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and 20th century psychotherapy.  In other words, we can begin to access the benefits and wisdom of these traditions, without the institutional and historical baggage that often alienates people.

And as a practicing Christian, I suspect that something like this — a community of soul healing based on self-awareness — is what Jesus had in mind in the first place.

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Childhood Patterns.

I have recently been fascinated with the “childhood patterns” found in each type, and how these lead directly to the characteristics of each type.  Type seems to emerge very early in life.  There is debate about whether we are born our type or whether we become our type in the first few days of life in reaction to our environment.  In any case, personality type is established when we are very young.  For example, infants who are 8’s are often observably different from infants who are 5’s. 

(Most of this is based on Don Riso's work, first appearing in Personality Types, published in 1987.) 

There are two functions we perceive as infants: nurturing and protecting.  Traditionally we identify these with mother and father respectively, but since this is not always the case I will be talking more inclusively and generally about functions and figures.  (Sometimes, however, it is helpful to invoke “mother” or “father” as a helpful shorthand to make a point.)

It is very important to realize that the reactions we have to these figures are not necessarily the figures’ fault.  The infant is predisposed to experience each figure a certain way.  It may have nothing to do with anything the figure actually did or didn’t do.  (To say an infant “feels” rejected does not mean in any way that the parent actually rejected them.)  Or the figure may unwittingly play into the infant’s predisposition.  In any case, as infants we react to our early experience in a particular way.

These reactions take three forms: we can feel (1) attached to, (2) frustrated with, or (3) rejected by, either or both of the figures, depending on our type.

(1)  We may feel attached to one or both of these two figures.  This leads us to identify with that figure.  We see to become, emulate, please, and reflect the energy of that figure.

(2)  Or we may feel frustrated by one or both of these figures.  Not getting what we need, we set out to provide this function for ourselves.  In other words, we try to become our own nurturer and/or protector.

(3)  Or we may feel rejected by one or both of these figures.  Rejection means we don’t have any experience or knowledge of this function at all.  Our response then is to overcompensate and adopt the role of the other figure, mainly in how we deal with others.  We will see how this relates to each type, even forming the basic dynamic of the type.

Here’s how it works out in terms of each type.

The “childhood pattern” of the eight is an experience of being rejected by the nurturing figure.  This prompts the eight to overcompensate by taking on the protective role relative to others.  In short, they try to become like “fathers” to others.  At their best, eights are nurturing protectors; at their worst they are heartless, dominating tyrants.

The “childhood pattern” for nines is attachment to both the protecting and the nurturing figures.  Identifying with both figures, they have little psychic room for themselves.  They want to become their parents.  They identify with others so much that they need to feel others are okay before they will feel okay about themselves.

Ones’ “childhood pattern” is to feel frustrated with the protecting figure.  This leads them to try and fill this function for themselves.  They try to become “fathers” to themselves, so to speak.  Their energy is directed inward against their own internal impulses.

For twos, the “childhood pattern” is to feel rejected by the protecting figure.  This leads them to overcompensate by emphasizing the nurturing function especially towards others.  They try to become others’ “mother.”  They focus on what they think others need or want. They try to please.

The “childhood pattern” of threes is attachment to the nurturing figure.  They try to satisfy, appease, and please this figure.  They want to become their “mothers” by dedicating themselves to what is held up as valuable in their own family system.

Fours’ “childhood pattern” is to feel frustrated with both the nurturing and protecting figures.  Thus feeling alienated and out of place in their own families, they try and provide these functions for themselves, attempting to parent themselves in both areas.  Directing their attention inward, fours create a self-image based on being different, unique.

For fives, the “childhood pattern” is to feel rejected by both figures.  Thus they have no experience or knowledge of either parental function.  However, since they can’t overcompensate by turning to either figure, they resign themselves to not getting either benefit.  They try to fill the void with an intense mental life, observing the world.

Sixes’ “childhood pattern” is to feel attached to the protecting figure.  They thus internalize the guidance, as well as the anxieties, of this figure.  They try to become their fathers.  Inwardly, sixes strategize, mentally trying to provide for every eventuality, and outwardly they create alliances that will provide support and guidance.

Finally, the “childhood pattern” of sevens is to feel frustrated by the nurturing figure.  This leads them to try and to provide this function for themselves, becoming, in effect, “mothers” to themselves, ever looking for ways to self-nurse.  Sevens are therefore adventurous—filling life with activities.

Anyway, I have found looking at these “childhood patterns” to be very helpful in understanding the emotional root of each type.