|
Nation |
Issue Date: February 2, 2007 Editors Note: Personality portrait systems such as the Myers-Briggs typology or the enneagram have long been popular with many Catholics, especially those in religious life. Clarence Thomson is the author of Parables and the Enneagram, a look at how the scriptures and the enneagram enrich each other. Thomson works as an enneagram coach and is coauthor of the Web site www.enneagramcentral.com, where a free test can give visitors a sense of where they fit. Thomson was interviewed by Thomas C. Fox, NCRs former editor and publisher, for an NCR podcast. How did you get interested in the enneagram? People have been using it for some 20 centuries probably. We can trace its history directly back to Bolivian philosopher Oscar Ichazo in the early 1960s. He says he got it from the kabbalah or from a vision. Research shows that the nine-faceted diagram itself is from Islamic mystics, the Sufis, while the terms of the styles are in Latin. The word enneagram itself is Greek, so here Hebrew, Greek and Roman Catholic all come together. Each of the enneagram styles is basically a sin, but not sin in the Baltimore Catechism sense of a wrong deed. It is much closer to the medieval Scholastic thinking of sin as an energy you push too far and turn into a fault. The nine enneagram styles are centered either within the body, within the heart or emotions, or within the intellect. Each number has a particular problem or sin associated with it: For Ones, its anger; for Twos, its pride; for Threes, its vanity. For Fours, envy; for Fives, avarice; for Sixes, fear; for Sevens, gluttony; for Eights, lust; for Nines, sloth. How does it help me to know my style, if Im stuck in it and
wont change? With self-awareness we can change our perspective. If you are wearing sunglasses, its a good idea to be aware you are wearing them. Study of the enneagram reveals to you the distorting lens you are wearing and it helps you see the distorting lens others wear. What I do as a coach is help facilitate that awareness. I graduated from college at 22 with a degree in philosophy. Few are as self-importantly smart as a youth with such a degree. I was cured of that though on my first job working in a mental institution. One day I talked with a woman whose belief was that her mother was an African queen and her father a Bengal tiger. Armed with a philosophy degree, I knew I could talk her out of this craziness. An hour later, she still believed what she did. How could she be so clever and logical, and so crazy? A seasoned doctor told me that insanity resides in the imagination, not in logic. Our enneagram style is our imaginary view of the world. When I know what someones imaginary view is, I can help them see it too, thereby weakening imaginations hold. Fr. Andrew Greeley and others tell us that the Catholic tradition is rich in imagination. When I saw the enneagram styles as a distortion of imagination, I knew I had lots of Catholic resources with which to help people with their imaginative constructs. For example, Sixes are the most explicitly fearful type. Well, angels appear in the scriptures 365 times, so I always encourage a devotion to angels for Sixes so that their imaginative world can have some support in it, with recourse to angels. You deal with not just individuals but with institutions, religious communities as a whole. I would never coach anyone without an awareness of the background of their company, religious order, or country of origin. In America, for example, we have a Three-ish culture, marked by a can-do attitude, impressed with the importance of self-fulfillment, with rugged individualism, with a focus on image and spin. A popular book now with both Protestants and Catholics is called The Purpose-Driven Life. Its just advice on how to be a good Three. Once I learn my style, how will it benefit me in walking my own
spiritual path? Every enneagram style is an experience of some kind of deprivation, while interestingly Jesus parables about Gods kingdom are stories of abundance. Most spiritual traditions -- Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Taoism -- all love to tell stories. They say that we are all asleep, and the way to awaken is to hear stories that get underneath the protective radar of our particular illusions. For example, in the Old Testament, David has made love to Bathsheba. Nathan then asks him what he would do with a man who has many sheep yet steals one from a poor shepherd. Nathan hints thats what David did, and because Nathan got under his radar screen with that little story, David did public penance. When Jesus had to deal with stiff-necked Pharisees, he got under their prejudices with stories. In Chapter 10 of Luke, the lawyer asks him, What must I do to be saved? The lawyer wished to be justified, or, in other words, to have his enneagram view validated. Jesus told him instead the story of the man from Jerusalem on his way to Jericho. Jesus gave the lawyer the view from the ditch, a perspective hed never encountered before. Storytelling experts tell us that we always identify with the first person mentioned. Thus Jesus tricked him and blew up his enneagram illusion. Parables dismantle trances. How well does the enneagram fit with Catholic theology? Traditional Catholic theology, back to the medieval Scholastics, shows that sin is a force over which we dont have much control. Its expressed well in St. Pauls famous passage in Romans about not doing the good that he sees, but rather doing the evil that he doesnt want. If you see sin that way, you are much closer to a notion of addiction, and right on top of the concept of an enneagram style. The enneagram is an explanation of and a partial cure for sin. On the Web National Catholic Reporter, February 2, 2007 |
Copyright © The
National Catholic Reporter Publishing Company, 115 E. Armour Blvd.,
Kansas City, MO 64111 All rights reserved. TEL: 816-531-0538 FAX: 1-816-968-2280 Send comments about this Web site to: webkeeper@ncronline.org |