The Enneagram in spiritual direction
Cross Cave is a system of more than 20 underground lakes in Slovenia, where the Adriatic Sea meets the Alps in Central Europe. The fragile rock formations keep tourism limited, which makes it one of the best-preserved caves in the world. It was first documented in 1832, but it wasn’t until another 100 years that it was fully explored in 1926. More than 45 different organisms call it home, many of them not discovered until after 2000, which makes it one of the largest cave ecosystems in the world in terms of biodiversity.
Right in the midst of the European civilization and the Roman Empire, this treasure of nature remained hidden for thousands of years. Can you imagine? Countless generations lived and died and never knew it was right there.
How many of us live our lives never knowing the deep beauty and treasure of what lies within us, the image of God just below the surface of every human we meet?
What if there were a tool for plumbing those depths? For spelunking into our inner world and uncovering our gifts?
This is what the Enneagram is for. It’s simply a tool. There’s nothing magical about it. Nothing sinister about it, either. It’s a tool that describes 9 interconnected patterns of human motivation. It gives us eyes to see those patterns.
What is the Enneagram for?
Evagrius Ponticus was a monk who lived in the 4th century. The desert mothers and fathers of this era used the word “passions” to describe those things that prevented an individual from experiencing the love of God. Evagrius was the first to systematize a list of the passions as well as strategies for combatting them—gluttony, avarice, impurity, depression/sadness, anger, acedia, vainglory, and pride. It’s a kind of proto-psychology that Evagrius did 1,500 years before any formal social sciences. The “passions” would later be the basis for the “Seven Deadly Sins” of medieval times.
I find the “passions” to be a helpful starting point for learning the Enneagram for a number of reasons. One is understanding that our ultimate goal is our connection to the love of God, and our work is to learn how to see our compulsions that self-sabotage that connection and disrupt them. Another is an idea taken from St. Augustine that all truth is God’s truth. The Enneagram is a melting pot of historic wisdom traditions from around the world. It continues to evolve and endure because it resonates with the human experience, and that includes the Christian experience, too. It’s elastic enough that we can fill it with as much Christian language or as little as works for us. It’s not unique to the Christian faith, but it resonates enough with the human experience to make it a useful tool in our pursuit of the love of God. Today, the Enneagram describes 9 patterns, where we can trace 9 vices and 9 virtues.
What about spiritual direction?
A spiritual director is a wise guide who can accompany us on our spiritual journey. They are a person who listens with us as we listen to God. Spiritual direction isn’t a new fad but rather something that the Christian tradition can trace back to the desert mothers and fathers of the early church, like Evagrius.
Spiritual direction can be a regular spiritual practice of discerning God’s work in our lives in conversation with another person. We’re not designed to do the spiritual life alone, and a spiritual director is one relationship (among many) we can draw on for wisdom, clarity, and companionship as we learn to hear and trust the invitations of God.
What the desert mothers and fathers had was an insatiable desire to know the love of God and an authentic lived experience with God. Today, a host of resources and opportunities for specialized training exist for those with the gifts and graces for this ministry of sacred listening. One shouldn’t take the label of “spiritual director” lightly. A trained spiritual director is able to add to their experience of God a wide array of tried-and-true tools for paying attention to our life and our walk with God. The Enneagram can be one of these tools.
Why does the Enneagram need spiritual direction?
I first learned the Enneagram as part of a spiritual direction training program. In the years since, it has exploded in the popular consciousness with books and podcasts and training programs. It’s all over social media. I’ve known people to introduce themselves in a group setting with an Enneagram number. I’ve heard of churches doing sermon series based on it. There’s certainly some fun and camaraderie to have in sharing a common language, but the Enneagram isn’t a toy or a game. (I do have a card game based on the Enneagram.)
In Seeds of Contemplation, Thomas Merton writes, “Every one of us is shadowed by an illusory person: a false self. My false and private self is the one who wants to exist outside the reach of God’s will and God’s love—outside of reality and outside of life. And such a self cannot help but be an illusion.” This is deep stuff, and really hard stuff, too. I would go a step further than Merton and suggest we deal with more than one single false self. I have many to contend with. That’s heavy work, and if I want to use the Enneagram to tackle that work, I need the wisdom of a spiritual director with me. The stuff that lurks in my shadows would prefer not being messed with, so I'd better not do that work alone. This is why we want to do our Enneagram work with a spiritual director.
While the Enneagram offers us language for seeing our vices—anger, pride, deceit, envy, avarice, anxiousness, gluttony, lust, and sloth—it also provides us ways to see good things, too. If these good gifts can be true of us, and we are made in the image of God, then this can also be a way of talking about what God is like.
We can see a God whose character is revealed in goodness and rightness, love and care, hope and radiance, creativity and depth, wisdom and insight, faithfulness and courage, joy and abundance, power and protection, peace and oneness.
Getting practical
As a spiritual director, my work is not to become an expert in the Enneagram and teach my directee. No, my work is to be an expert in the love of God and in the human being sitting in front of me. If the directee wants to talk about the Enneagram and their type, I want to ask questions that invite a deeper curiosity that wrap in their experience of God in prayer, their daily life, and other spiritual practices.
If their questions or situations they are describing seem to me to be revealing deeper questions around identity and gifts or why they feel stuck in a particular way, I might softly suggest an introductory book like Self to Lose, Self to Find or The Enneagram for Spiritual Formation as something we can talk about in the future.
For someone who has gotten really into the Enneagram, I might ask gentle questions about how it squares with their life experience and experience of God. Is it more than interesting data to them? In other words, how is this inviting you into a deeper sense of freedom and healing and love for others and God? Another question I like to offer someone well-versed in the Enneagram is, how do you receive the qualities of your type from God? If you self-identify as a Two, how do you receive God’s Two-ness? If you’re a Seven, how do you experience God’s Seven-ness? I always find a lot to explore in this wondering. As a director, I also often find it fruitful to remind the directee of the gifts of the pattern they identify with, the ways this pattern reveals God’s character that they then participate in.
When I’m a directee, knowing the patterns of my type can be something like a trailhead for beginning to explore why a relationship may be stuck, why prayer feels dry, or why I feel out of place with my church community. Having an awareness of how the patterns overlap and connect can give me clues to what invitations the Holy Spirit may be offering. If I relate to the pattern of a Five, Five in growth looks like Eight, and Eight in growth looks like Two. So the wisdom experienced by Five moves to the action of Eight in service to others, like Two.
Know the limits of your tools
Like any tool, the Enneagram is great for jobs it’s made for. It’s not great for jobs it’s not made for. It’s simply one tool among many in our toolbox for gauging our emotional health and spiritual self-awareness. It should take us deeper into the mystery of what makes humans human instead of lulling us into a false sense of certainty.
We want to be wary of making it a label we put on ourselves or on others. Labels limit. It may also be helpful to think of the Enneagram as being more noun than adjective. It’s not a thing you are, but rather gives an ever-widening imagination for describing the you that you are. You are not a number. You are a human being made in God’s image. Attaching to an Enneagram type with certainty may also be yet one more trick that enables a false self to hide in plain sight.
Last thoughts
We have a lot of lakes in Oklahoma. It’s not unusual to see signs along the water that say “No wake zone.” A boat going too fast creates a wake on the water that can disrupt or damage other boats.
Oftentimes, being a human is a lot like this. We leave wakes behind us in our interactions with people, whether strangers or people we care deeply about. Wouldn’t it be great to grow in awareness of the wake you leave behind so that you’re not doing harm that you’d rather not be doing?
Exploring the patterns and movements in the Enneagram in conversation with a spiritual director is a wonderful way of doing that work of growth.
