Mike: Welcome friends to the Everything Belongs podcast with Father Richard Rohr. Each season, we’ve explored one of Richard’s deep teachings focusing on his books. Each episode, we’ve traveled over to Richard’s house to discuss a chapter with him, and then we’re joined by a guest who helps us live the teachings forward, thinking about Richard’s teachings in new ways by asking new questions emerging from our rapidly changing world. We’ve looked at Falling Upward, we’ve explored Eager to Love, and last season we looked at Richard’s latest book, The Tears of Things. This season is going to be a little bit different and extra special because we’re going back to Richard’s work and teaching on an ancient tool of discernment, solidarity, and self-discovery that focuses on how our wounds lead us to our wisdom and our work in the world. And of course, I’m talking about the enneagram. For those of you who have never heard the word enneagram before, the enneagram is a word with Greek roots referring technically to a nine-pointed shape, but it’s used today to refer to a personality system that identifies nine unique interconnected types. Now, you’ll see that symbol on the cover of a lot of enneagram books. What makes the enneagram so exciting is that it’s not only based on the tools of contemporary psychology, but it also draws from the teachings of several different ancient wisdom traditions, including and especially the contemplative Christian tradition.
A lot of our listeners first encountered Richard as an enneagram teacher, and in the first part of our episode, we head over to Richard’s living room to ask him how he first encountered the enneagram and what it taught him. In the second part of the episode, we’ll call in the council to kick off the conversation with this season’s amazing hosting team, Drew Jackson, Carmen Acevedo Butcher, Paul Swanson, our newest host, Cassidy Hall, and of course myself, Mike Petrow. Together, we explore our own enneagram experiences, why we think it’s a helpful tool, and we share our excitement and expectations for this season. Whether you’re an enneagram enthusiast or brand new to this teaching, we hope you’ll join us in this conversation about how the enneagram can help reveal that everything and everyone belongs. From the Center for Action and Contemplation, I’m Mike Petrow.
Paul: I’m Paul Swanson.
Carmen: I’m Carmen Acevedo Butcher.
Cassidy: I’m Cassidy Hall.
Drew: And I’m Drew Jackson.
Mike: And this is Everything Belongs. Richard, Paul, I cannot believe that we are here. One, for another season of Everything Belongs. Two, I can’t believe we’re here to talk about the enneagram. Before we get started, Paul, I have to ask, what is your enneagram origin story? How did you first learn about the enneagram?
Paul: I didn’t know anything about it until I came here to the CAC as an intern in 2007. And everyone, of course, was a flutter talking about their types and what the enneagram was, and I was like, “What are we talking about?” So I borrowed Richard’s book on the enneagram and I read it in secret, just trying to figure out who I am. I could be any of these numbers. And then I got to nine and type nine just landed so easily of like, “Oh yeah, this is embarrassing. This is showcasing who I am. Does everybody know this about me?”
Richard: That’s so often people’s response, “Does Everybody know this about me But me?”
Mike: Oh my gosh.
Paul: There’s a great moment too, because I’m discerning this. I just realized I’m a nine and feeling embarrassed about it. And we invited Richard over to the intern house to have dinner and Richard’s sitting next to me and I’m eating soup and Richard leans over-
Richard: Slowly.
Paul: Exactly. Richard says, “You eat like a nine.”
Mike: Wow.
Richard: I said that really.
Paul: And I just shake my-
Richard: How shameless of me.
Paul: But it was a confirmation of something that I had already recognized through reading the book. And I was like, there it is. I’m so transparent at who I am. Richard could tell by how I ate soup. So soup is really the great indicator for me about me being a nine.
Richard: Did you play with it a little bit?
Paul: I would take a bite or a sip and then I’d put the spoon down and look around, soak in the scene and you caught me red-handed. So that’s how it came to me was when I was an intern at the CAC. But how about you? What’s your origin story with enneagram Mike?
Mike: I think when I was deeply immersed in contemplative practice from the Eastern Orthodox world, but I was moving into Western contemplation and I was going on retreats I would hear people mention it. And I picked up a book about the enneagram. I don’t remember which book it was. And I saw that symbol on the cover and my old evangelical baggage kicked in.
Richard: Oh, I can tell.
Mike: And I thought, oh, it looks like a pentagram.
Richard: Pentagram.
Mike: Must be witchcraft. And so then as a joke for years, people would ask me what I thought about the enneagram and I would say, “Oh, it’s witchcraft.”
Paul: Yeah.
Richard: Did you really?
Mike: Oh yeah, yeah. For years. I still say it sometimes just for fun.
Richard: Witch craft.
Mike: When I entered The Living School, that’s when I first realized how seriously people took it. And I knew typologies. I was really into Myers-Briggs and a few other things. But as a Living School student, other students kept asking me, “What’s your enneagram type? What’s your enneagram type?” And I genuinely didn’t know, which was then an invitation for everyone to guess. So people keep making suggestions and a lot of those suggestions revolved around my fashion sense. And then in the end, when I met Richard, Richard asked what my type was and Richard suggested-
Richard: I shouldn’t do that. Go ahead.
Mike: I know. I know you’re not supposed to type people, but Richard suggested that I might be a four. And to anyone listening who doesn’t know what it means that we’re talking about being a four or a nine, I promise you’re going to learn all about that this season, but Richard suggested I might be a four. And then at one point he said, “I don’t know if you’re a four because you smile too much.”
Richard: That’s right. I would still say that.
Mike: And do you remember what I said?
Richard: No.
Mike: I said, “I smile because I’m thinking about sadness and it makes me so happy.”
Richard: What an answer.
Mike: Yes. And I think you assured me that that was a very enneagram four answer. But it’s wild to me how many folks I talk to who when I ask how they first discovered Richard, they will say it was his teachings on the enneagram.
Richard: Oh yeah. Yeah.
Paul: One of the amazing things about you as a human and as a teacher is how much you follow your curiosity. I’ve seen it bringing to deep study of scripture, men’s rights of passages, psychology, myth, art, mysticism, the list goes on. And like we were saying, one of the major things you’re known for is the enneagram, but this is not something that your curiosity led you to. As you say, it found you. Can you share with us when you first heard the word enneagram? How did the enneagram find you?
Richard: I knew I needed a spiritual director. I found one. Father Jim O’Brien, SJ Jesuit. He led me very gracefully. He didn’t let me know he was teaching me the enneagram, but he was. I thought he was just helping me understand myself. He was helping me understand what a one is, how one operates, and he lets me know I’m a so called one, and I can still see the place on the street where I’m driving back to the community, which wasn’t far from Xavier University, and the truth of it all just descends. My God, he’s right. How did he know that? Where did he learn that? My whole life is offering correctives to things, which I hate about myself, and yet it’s my gift. It’s what I’m a natural at. It would be perfect except for … Dang, that’s just the way my mind works. So I still went to his sessions, private spiritual direction sessions for I think several years, and he brought it to a fullness.
Soon I invited a couple Jesuits. He couldn’t do it himself, Jim, but a couple others to come and teach it to this budding community. We might have been one of the first lay, if I can call it that, groups to learn it. Priests and nuns were learning it quickly. So much so it became identified with the Catholic Church and with retreat houses and religious orders because it answered so many questions that you long to have answered when you’re in community about who you are and who everybody else is and why on a certain level people don’t change.
So I got good at it because I was using it to pastorally direct this 400 people that moved into the neighborhood. We had 14 households, common living situations where we had headship as we called it then. And we just needed a skillset to know how to critique that. Critique authority in general. Well, he’s just an eight and he can’t help it. He’s a whatever else. And I’m a one, correcting, recognizing that everything needs correction. It’s as recent as my recent book on The Tears of Things, pleading for the gift of self-criticism. And you could draw a direct line from my enneagram fascination to my book 42 books later. If you don’t have corrective, everything corrupts, everything rots, everything is too much of one thing. But if you have leaders who catch their own shadow to use Jungian term, which is a discovery that came a few years later, the recognition of the shadow, those two just worked together real well to recognize your shadow. And we had a format for recognizing your shadow and dang it was amazingly accurate to such a degree. I still can’t believe it 50 years later, 40 years later, whatever it is.
It allowed me to save so many marriages, so many pastoral teams, so many friendships. Once people knew that he’s doing that because he’s a six, and he’s not just doing that to get me, or because he’s hardhearted. He’s just who he is. And it took so much of the moral questioning, moral judgmentalism out of it, because when you told the person to a certain level, he’s not going to change, you’ve got to help him turn it into a gift. That was the genius of the enneagram, turning, as we called it that, your sin into your gift, And it worked. Once you could liberate them from the obsessive character of it and allow it to be a quiet teacher inside, watch it, you’re going there, you’re overdoing it.
We’re still waiting for the definitive study, which says, why? Why is this almost an ontology? It’s not just a personality profile, it’s an ontological basis somehow. How can something be so true? It explains my marriage relationship. It explains my children, which is by the way, hard to do. People you’re really close to, your parents, your children, your partner. You have such a complex, multi-layered relationship with them. It’s hard to do your own family. But when you do, and if it’s a correct diagnosis, the fruit is fruitful, very fruitful. We required an enneagram course as necessary for pre-marriage counseling. They both had to know their numbers and they’d sit and talk with me for a few hours. So I got led into the enneagram step by step. It’s growing in popularity again.
Mike: Very much so.
Richard: Yeah.
Mike: For me, the connection you just made there to the shadow, that’s a really, really helpful way for me to think about the enneagram as a tool that helps us.
Richard: It’s a very helpful way.
Mike: Yeah. Look at our shadow lovingly. Because shadow work is we see the parts of ourself that we don’t want to see. We recognize that they might need some education and some liberation, but also a lot of love. Richard, as a one, you have all this insightful critique. Did it give you freedom to be who you were and also love more the rough edges around that?
Richard: Yes, to both of them. Yeah.
Mike: Well, I think about even Tears of Things. You talk about the need for self critique, but how that has to be rooted in love. And the need for external critique, but has that has to be rooted in us.
Richard: Because it’s forgiveness right behind the recognition of the fault, but hey, I could forgive it. He’s not perverse. He’s not trying to get me. He’s just being his obsessive thing. Now, let him see it and do it for good, for good, for goodness’ sake.
Mike: That’s where you turn the weakness or the wound into wisdom, right?
Richard: Yeah.
Mike: You do it for good.
Richard: Isn’t it interesting we have that expression? For goodness’s sake, to do the same thing, but now let’s do it in a way that builds instead of deconstructs. And you found it worked for every one of the nine types, each discovering who they were.
Mike: And it’s so insightful to think about the fact that our superpower is also our weakness and our weaknesses.
Richard: So biblically in my reading of the scriptures, yeah. That love of paradoxical thinking is central.
Paul: Richard, you’ve alluded to the nine types. We’ve thrown out numbers and a few attributes to each. Can we take a minute just to go through each of the nine types and just give a snapshot? We’re going to go through each one in more detail throughout the rest of this podcast season.
Mike: Yeah, rest of the year.
Paul: We’ll go through one by one slowly, but just a very brief overview of each type.
Mike: So we were wondering if we could just ask you one at a time what the strength and the weakness of each number is, and then we’ll ask you if there’s one person in history or scripture that you immediately think of who embody that number. So starting at the top, Richard, with the enneagram one, what’s the weakness and what’s the strength?
Richard: The one where this comes from, God only knows, but you find them in every culture. All nine of these are found. I taught this in Japan. I taught it in Africa. I taught it in Latin America. They all got it. The one are those people who have an overriding need to do it right, to be right. Now, there’s something good about that, but there’s something dangerous about that. Do you really think you are right? And that’s the trouble you do, which makes you judgmental. And yet without ones, a whole bunch of things wouldn’t happen. Now, I’m going to say that about all nine types. A whole bunch of things wouldn’t happen, but I’m so aware that my righteousness is dangerous, it’s so dangerous for my own soul, first of all, but for the way I relate to others, because I want them to do it right. I don’t understand why people wouldn’t do it right, as if I knew it’s all based on a false premise. Now I’m talking far more than one sentence.
Mike: No. That’s great though. But in addition to Father Richard Rohr, one on the enneagram, who’s a one from scripture or history that we could think about?
Richard: John Calvin.
Mike: John Calvin. Oh my God. Okay. Moving on.
Paul: That one rings a bell.
Richard: He’s a one off the chart. I never read the institutes that he wrote. Apparently Presbyterians say it’s wonderful.
Paul: Okay. Let’s go to two, Richard. What is the wound and the wisdom of the two type?
Richard: The two loves to connect and to be connected. It becomes the whole purpose of their life. They therefore think and there’s some truth to it that they are better lovers. Don’t think in the sexual way juster than everybody else because they so appreciate relationship, romance, infatuation. They’re in love with the idea of being in love with loving other people. And until we had the book in my lifetime and yours on codependency, we didn’t realize there was another meaning to an awful lot of love. It’s highly self-serving, manipulative, and addictive. We had to give that a name. But that didn’t come till my lifetime. Codependency. Twos tend to be very codependent people. My caregiver that we all know who comes here to the house, he’s a two off the wall. He knows all of this. I can tease him about it. Every day it’s, he met a new friend and he wants to deepen the friendship. It’s an addiction to friendship, which becomes manipulative to the friend.
Mike: Thinking of the song Addicted to Love, we could have a song for every year.
Richard: Oh, yes.
Paul: That would be good.
Richard: Oh, that’s been done. People have popular music for each of the nine types.
Paul: Is there a biblical or historical figure that comes to mind for you?
Richard: I suspect the obvious ones are Mary Magdalena and John the Apostle. John who has to put his head on the breast of Jesus. I’m the special one and it’s true, but it’s dangerous. Mary Magdalene, who has to make a big show of pouring oil over his feet to show her capacity for love. But it’s true. It’s dangerous. Are other people not loving who don’t enjoy such sacramental action as anointing the feet?
Mike: So Richard, then what is the wound and what is the wisdom of the enneagram three?
Richard: The three somehow learned very early that they were only really valuable if they were productive. People would only really love them if they came through with product. So they become experts at producing effect. And thank God for them. We love them. You want to get something done. You better have a three on the team. They’re problem solvers. Coming down the mountain yesterday from Angel Fire, it was six men and the car I was at, I was a driver, thank God. Couldn’t get up the icy rise on the highway. Almost every one of them, they’re problem solvers. They’re just in one minute jumping out of the car, getting behind it, backing up. Let’s try the hill one more time. I think we had to do it six times before we could get up. But I knew we would because they’re not all threes. I don’t know if any of them are, but they are problem solvers. So we all love threes. It’s what much of the world loves and hates about America. We’re utilitarian. We’re problem solvers. We get it done. It’s wonderful, but it creates superficiality as if the only answer is to solve the problem. Now what? That you got up the hill. What else does life mean besides a slick way to get up the hill?
Mike: Who’s a good example of a three in scripture or history?
Richard: Probably David. I’ve never used that before, but if you look at him, he’s succeeding as the warrior, as the lover. He loves Yahweh the best. If he wrote the Psalms, he knows how. And he does. If he didn’t have threes, we’d hardly have a language for productive love, effective love. So David comes to mind.
Paul: How about of fours? What’s the wound and the wisdom of fours?
Richard: Fours are so interesting. They love being special. They love being creative. So they notice the edges and the top and the bottom. They almost hate the normal. It’s beneath them being normal. They revel and delight in the exception to the rule and they operate on the exceptional plane. And the rest of us benefit from it. Who writes plays? Who creates musicals except fours? Watch the Oscars. It’s just a whole evening of fours. And the rest of us delight at it. Look at that outfit she’s in. Who else would create a dress like that except a four? So the rest of us delight in it while also a bit dismissive of it. It’s too showy. It’s too special. It needs to be noticed. And so most of us have a love, hate relationship with four, except other fours, which makes their sin envy. They see, wow, that’s good. That’s a beautiful dress. That’s a beautiful song. And I wish I would’ve written it in trouble. I wish I would’ve made that dress.
Appearance, visuals are extremely important to fours. How it looks. And you see how that can so led itself to vanity, to superficiality. After the first half of life of doing that, what is there besides impressing people? So one of their favorite words is authentic. They love the word authentic because they’re trying their whole life to be authentic and they often achieve it in moments, by which as well any of us do. Okay the four.
Paul: Yeah. Thank you for that in the four. And then how about, is there a figure from scripture or history that pops out?
Richard: Who would be the four?
Mike: I keep telling Richard it’s Jesus, but he doesn’t want to get on board with that one.
Richard: Who?
Mike: I keep saying Jesus is a four.
Richard: No.
Mike: Refuse to get on board with that.
Paul: I was going to say Liberace.
Mike: Liberace. You talked to me about a dress. Did you ever see the picture when Lady Gaga wore the dress that was all Kermit the Frog heads?
Richard: No.
Mike: Oh my God. It’s one of my favorite things ever.
Richard: No. They’re so self-confident in their creativity. They know some people think they’re weird, but they don’t care. Who would be a biblical figure who’s a four?
Mike: Ezekiel maybe? We just talked about Ezekiel.
Paul: Oh interesting.
Mike: And all the-
Richard: Oh, Ezekiel.
Paul: His drama.
Richard: For sure, Ezekiel.
Mike: That’s good.
Richard: Yes. All of his posturing and pretending and enacting. Yeah. People probably don’t know his biography that much, but you’re absolutely right. Ezekiel, the prophet would be a four.
Paul: Folks can go back to that episode and listen to it again where we talked about Ezekiel with that lens.
Mike: All right. So enneagram five, Richard, what’s the wound and what’s the wisdom?
Richard: The five is unable to trust or enjoy action. They want authenticity, interiority, and there they find their superiority when being interior and authentic and liberated. So it produces Buddhism. Fives aren’t naturally Christians. They’re naturally Buddhist and there’s much to be said for that. They’re always a bit withdrawn, a bit non-needy for group affirmation. They just sit in the background or on the side and with their astute inner observations. But they’re not really judgmental. They’re just limited to the inner. They’re masters of the inner. And it’s beautiful, but in its worst case, it’s snobbish. Yeah, they can almost have lived inside so long that they don’t know how to relate in the outside. They’re not interested in it. We had early staff who were fives who came to join the CAC because they could be contemplative. And it’s amazing how little work they produced. Action isn’t important for them. Yeah. It’s just clarification, endless clarification.
Mike: Who’s a good historical or biblical or even … You mentioned Buddhism from another religion. Who’s a good example of a five?
Richard: Probably the almost two obvious one would be Thomas the Doubter. Who until his intellectual problem is solved, is not going to enter into serious relationship with Jesus. Unless I touch, which he’s exactly right. The five is afraid of anything too physical, too touchy-feely.
Mike: That’s interesting too, because I can’t help but reflect on the fact that tradition says that Thomas and history seems to indicate that Thomas went to India. And also the gospel of Thomas is deeply interior. It’s so psychologically complex. Interesting. Interesting. Interesting.
Paul: Let’s swing it up to the six. What’s the wisdom and wound of the six?
Richard: The wound of the six is we assume early in life they experienced insecurity, doubt, non-safety. Fear is the easiest way to say it. That the world is a scary place and I better be careful. They might be the most common number worldwide. There’s a beautiful side to that. They’re little people who are just content to do their little job, running their fruit stand on the edge of town and making sure there’s enough fruit to sell tomorrow. And they don’t need a lot beyond that.
Paul: Hobbits.
Richard: It’s just resolve my fears and I’m alive. I’m okay. Now that makes them very loyal. And if you have a six friend, they will be most loyal and beautiful, but it can make them live in a very small world. What I need is to be secured and secure me and I’ll stay with you. In Jesus’ most common one-liner is do not be afraid. And I think that’s because religion has misused that and called it religion being obedient. Obedience was more important than love. I think a number of the Franciscans who taught me were fear-based men. You never expected anything courageous or new or different. All they do is repeat the orthodoxy so they can have a hard time trusting change. They do have a hard time. In the Catholic Church, they hated Vatican too. It took away their Latin mass and really demanded radical change in terms of how we imaged Catholicism.
Paul: Is there a figure that comes to mind when you think about the six, whether in history or scripture?
Richard: Well, he isn’t that well known, but St. Thomas More, their very loyalty can make them loyal to the highest purpose. He was loyal to the King of England, but he was also, in the end, loyal to God even more. But a lawyer. He’s really a great saint. I don’t know if you ever saw the movie and the play, A Man for All Seasons. It’s the story of Thomas More. First-rate. They give law and conscience a good name if they’re healthy sixes because they tend to be humble people. They’re not overly assured of their own rightness.
Mike: So Richard, then thinking about the sevens, what is the wound and the wisdom of a seven?
Richard: A seven seems to have learned early that the way to live life is to fill it with juice and joy. And this is the way to triumph over pain. Overdo the travel and joy element, and I won’t feel the pain. We’re all trying to overcome the pain, but sevens make an art form of it. They hate death. My dad was a seven. I can remember when we took him to the cemetery plot where he was going to be buried with my mother. And he couldn’t look down at it. He just grimaced and looked away.
Mike: My dad’s a seven. Is the same way with death.
Richard: Yeah. They don’t like any talk of death or darkness.
Mike: But they give such a positive view of life and the future.
Richard: They’ve lived on the positive all their life. Now I’m convinced most sevens live longer than the rest of us.
Mike: Really?
Richard: Oh, they live into their 80s and 90s so often because their whole body is not suffering reality. I refuse to suffer.
Mike: Yeah.
Richard: I’m an enjoyer. And it works to a certain degree.
Mike: Is there a woman mystic that you would think of who’s a seven?
Richard: A seven couldn’t limit themselves to one little hermitage and live. That’s too little space. They need travel. They need movement. They need newness.
Mike: Who’s a good example of a seven?
Richard: Well, he’s only known in the Catholic world, but Saint Philip Neri was called the jokester of Rome. He would entertain the kids with jokes. He’s the patron of the initial parish church here in Albuquerque over here in Old Town, Saint Philip Neri. He’s a jokester. He was always feeling he could bring more people to God by humor and by judgment.
Mike: Oh, I love that.
Richard: Yeah. He must have been a delightful person. The Bible isn’t a very humorous book.
Mike: It is not.
Paul: Is it Sarah who laughs when she finds out she’s pregnant?
Mike: Yes. It’s a cynical laugh though.
Paul: It’s a cynical laugh. It’s a sharp laugh. On that note, let’s shift to the eight.
Mike: Oh yeah.
Paul: What is the wisdom and wound of the eight, Richard?
Richard: If we had time here, there’s overflow of one number into the next. They’re alike and they’re different by a few degrees. The biggest flip is between the seven and the eight. The seven is overly positive, the eight is seemingly negative. They venge themselves on reality. They fight reality. They love to be hard and harsh. They move forward by opposition. The sin is called lust in the true meaning of the word lust, not just sex, but overstatement, overkill. That’s the better word. It’s one big life of overkill and they can’t see it. They proceed by opposition.
Paul: Are there examples of eights that come to mind that you would point to? Dorothy Day came to mind, Joan of Ark.
Richard: I bet Joan of Ark was an eight. Yeah. Even wore men’s clothes, so she’d be taken seriously by men. They’re always fighting. That’s a good example, Joan of Arc. If they’re smart people, they know how to use power for good. They know how to manage power. I bet some of the heads of the United Nations were highly constructive eights who learned how to do it, use power for the good of the whole world, not just for their country or the West. Dag Hammarskjöld spoke with great authority.
Mike: Think for every eight born, God gives us a nine to keep things in balance. Richard, what’s the wound and the wisdom of the enneagram nine?
Richard: The nine doesn’t think they matter that much, but they don’t think anything matters that much. And so they float through life. There’s a beautiful part of it, which they don’t demand that you kiss up to them because they don’t … I’m no big deal. But it can lead them to be very unproductive. So it was associated with the capital sin of indolence or laziness. It isn’t really laziness, but it is afraid of taking initiative. Let other people take initiative. I’ll float. I’ll glide in and out of everything. And they do, which makes them easy friends, easy conversationalists, easy partners if you’re willing to tolerate their being late for everything. You’re not late for everything though, are you, Paul?
Mike: Not usually.
Richard: I don’t think so.
Mike: Yeah.
Richard: At your Minnesota training. They’re the nicest of all nine types, but they can be the most maddening too, because they expect everything to happen without their involvement, without them making it happen. Out of the other side of my mouth, I want to say that’s not true. They’re passive resistors. They’re protest marches opposing the stupid. They see the stupid. The wrong. The stance toward all of life is passive-aggressive. But again, if you have a friend as a nine, he’ll be a very good friend.
Mike: Yeah.
Because they’re humble and loyal.
What’s the real gift that the nine gives to everyone else? I ask about this because as a four, I’m so grateful for my nine friends. I feel like I learn more from them than anyone else.
Richard: Most of us like our nine friends.
Mike: Yeah.
Richard: Because they don’t demand so much from you. They’re content to be, and that takes the pressure off the rest of us to perform and to produce. They’re the non-producers. So they free the rest of us. They drive beaten up cars. It’s beautiful in so many ways.
Mike: What about Catherine of Siena? Writing letters to Popes, demanding peace and courage. Is that something else nines do? They work from the sidelines?
Richard: You’re onto something. That’s one of their big gifts is they’re peacemakers, harmonizers, reconcilers. They hate conflict. They love to tap it down.
Mike: Can’t remember the nines because they so don’t need to be remembered.
Paul: Lost to history.
Mike: When Evagrius, the other Macrina that I love, we talk about this when we talk about the history of the enneagram. When Evagrius was this young, hotshot theologian who was very good-looking and loved wearing fancy clothes and constant and openly got in trouble, because I think he was having an affair with a noblewoman’s wife, he fled out into the desert and he came to a contemplative community run by another Macrina and she was the one who said to him, “You need to go out in the desert. You need to learn not to speak unless you’re spoken to. You basically need to learn to shut up and realize that you’re not the center of attention.” And I don’t know if that’s nine or eight energy, but I think about that ability to take someone else and gently put them in check and send them out to do their work.
Richard: Yeah. They’d be good at that.
Mike: The soft prophecy.
Richard: Soft prophecy.
Mike: I like that.
Richard: That’s good. Yes.
Mike: Most important question to bring our enneagram overview to a close, we had a request to ask what number is Opie?
Richard: Oh, I think he’s a two, three. He loves to perform and please. Opie. Opie. Hi. You want nothing more than to make me happy, don’t you?
Mike: That’s codependent, Opie. He’s ready to love. Thank you, Richard.
Richard: Thank you.
Mike: Everything Belongs will continue in a moment.
What an amazing conversation with Richard. Origen of Alexandria said that the deeper issues of the spiritual life call for discussion, not definition, for exploration, not explanation, because the real quest is in the questions. Contemplation is so much more about conversation than it is conversion. I’ve already told you that this season is a little bit different. If you’d like to read along, you’re welcome to pick up a copy of Richard’s book, The Enneagram: A Christian Perspective, which he co-authored with Andreas Ebert. But what we would really love for you to do is to join the conversation. Perhaps you might want to start a reading group or simply an enneagram discussion group with friends who want to listen along and live the teachings forward yourselves, whether it’s a text thread, a Facebook group, or a monthly meeting in a coffee shop or a living room or a Zoom room. And of course, some of the deepest conversations take place in our journals or in prayer.
Our hope is that as we spend the next year exploring the enneagram, it helps us understand ourselves a little more, understand others, and figure out how we can all put our healing in the service of healing the world. To support that conversation, we’re going to figure out how to share some discussion questions and bonus tools with you every month. So stay tuned for more on that in our next episode. In that spirit, we now join our CAC hosting team for just one of these conversations. Drew Jackson is a published poet, a preacher, and a leader here at the Center for Action and Contemplation. Dr. Carmen Acevedo Butcher is a teacher, a translator, and our dean of faculty here at the CAC. Paul Swanson is the OG longest running staff person here who’s had almost every job from transcribing Richard’s old tapes to hosting his first podcast. Dr. Cassidy Hall is an author, a filmmaker, and an ordained minister with the UCC. And I’m Dr. Mike Petrow, a mythologist, a student of ancient stories and contemplative teachings through the lens of contemporary psychology.
I just want to note, folks, that Paul Swanson could only join us for part of the conversation, but don’t worry, he’ll be back with us next episode and for the rest of the season.
Paul and I got a chance to ask Richard this, “Drew, Cassidy, Carmen, I would love to hear from each of you. What is your enneagram origin story? Cassidy, you’re our newbie, so why don’t you go first?”
Cassidy: Like any good story, it begins with a monk. And I heard about the enneagram in around 2011 or 2012 from a monk at Snowmass Monastery, Brother Aaron. And honestly, he gave me the book, The Wisdom of the Enneagram, and I opened the book and I thought, “What is this hocus pocus? What am I looking at?” But it didn’t scare me. It excited me. It was that feeling you get when you come across something new and you have the opportunity to be defensive or curious. And I opted to be curious. Thank God I did.
Drew: I was at some kind of … Years ago. Some gathering for younger leaders who were doing ministry work. We were at lunch or dinner or something, and one of the elders who was there was familiar with the enneagram and was talking to some of us younger leaders about it. I just remember being so fascinated. And he was wise. He said, “I’m not going to tell you what your number is. I’m not going to try and type you. I just want you to sit with the descriptions of them. Read the shadow part of it and whatever one resonates with you or pierces you most, it’s probably the one that you identify most with.” And so yeah, that was my introduction to it was just the lunch, dinner, conversation, and just being drawn into the whole idea of it.
Paul: Drew, were you eating soup at the time?
Drew: I don’t think so.
Mike: Do we have to add how do you eat soup to a question for every single person?
Carmen: Well, Cassidy, you said every good story starts with a monk. And for me, I think we could also say every good story starts with a bookstore. And so it was 1989, November, and I was on a Fulbright studying at the University of London, and I thought my main priority was I want to go see Mother Bushbeck while she’s still alive and we can see each other in person, my dear friend. And so I went over there and it just happened to be a long weekend I stayed with her was the weekend that the Berlin Wall fell. So I’m sitting there with Sophie Bushbeck watching the Berlin Wallfall and that became sort of symbolic for me because at a bookstore in Heidelberg, I found this book with the weirdest title, [foreign language 00:46:18]. So Enneagram: The Nine Faces of the Soul. And I was like, “This is something weird.” And it just drew me to it. And it was actually Richard’s and Andreas Abert’s book. And it had just come out. I actually looked this up because you know you’re not sure if your memory is remembering exactly. And I looked it up and it did come out that summer in Germany.
And I’m from the Southern Baptist background being raised. And enneagram, Cassidy, you said Hocus, Pocus. Definitely that and then some. Do you know more like witchcraft, like Pentagram. You can tell me it means nine and drawing or nine and writing. And I am just so glad that I had such needs in my heart that my heart was like, who cares what anybody else would think? This seems like it could be useful to you. So I’m really grateful for books and bookstores.
Mike: Oh, that’s so good. Like Cassidy, I bumped into the enneagram at a monastery. I was at a retreat center in California and I saw a book about the enneagram on the shelf and I saw the symbol. And just like you, Carmen, I saw that symbol and it immediately made me think of a pentagram. And as a good former evangelical, my Satanic panic kicked in and I assumed that the enneagram was as evil as Dungeons and Dragons, heavy metal music and Pokemon. So I just put it out of my mind until I became a Living School student. And then as I kept meeting people, they kept asking me, “What’s your number? What’s your number?” And I thought, “Gosh, these folks are either really forward or really friendly. Why does everyone keep asking me for my phone number?” And eventually what I realized was people were asking me for my enneagram number and everyone was talking about it and I realized I needed to catch up. But I have to ask each of you, what’s your number?
Cassidy: So I am a five, which is also known as the investigator. So I love to collect information. I’m curious about nearly everything, and yet I also feel like I can never know enough, which is the downside because I become almost greedy for knowledge or greedy for time for myself to learn. So in a very generalized sense, I once read that fives fear being useless and deeply desire to be competent. This was the thing that nudged me to say, “Oh, that’s me.” This was the humbling moment when I read about the fear and the desire because those really resonated. It was very humbling to see that.
And so just a quick overview, our wing is a neighboring number on either side of your number. So for me, it would be a three or a four. And so for example, I’m a five with a four wing and the wings help us understand more about our relationship to the entire enneagram because while we have every number in us, our number and wing points us to just a more clear picture of how we show up in the world. So I’m also curious though, when you all share your number and your wing, I’d also love to know if any of you have been mischaracterized or mischaracterized yourself as another number or wanted to be another number. I have to admit, I had a little bit of four envy. I’m sure Mike has something to say about that.
Mike: It is the best number.
Cassidy: Because when I first came across the enneagram, I was sure I was a four. I was just positive. And part of that was just not taking the time to honestly listen to what was humbling me because I wanted to be a four, but it wasn’t the truth of who I was. But in turn, that did show me something about my wing. So Paul, how about you?
Paul: Thanks, Cassidy. I’ve already out of myself as a nine, the peacemaker, which has certainly been a driving force in my life for good and for ill. Always wanting to make sure that whether it’s my family of origin or communities I’m part of that folks are good with each other. And I know for me, part of that environmental tuning where I tune into what’s going on around me, I think nines are pretty porous. Everything just comes in and trying to understand what I actually feel about it, how I’m actually experiencing it and not letting others’ experiences or feelings override me has been a big piece of it. But the flip side of that, when I know what I want and I want to do, it is very, very clear. It might take me a while to get there. You can ask my wife how long it took me to be ready to get married, but once I’m in, I’m fully in.
And the number I’m most jealous of is the seven. My wife is a seven. She’s the funnest person I know. Sevens just create and look for opportunity. And I think part of my own … the shadowy side of the avoidant, I see sevens jump in and think about it afterwards, and I’m a little envious of that. Yeah. I’ll pass to Drew to get another perspective here.
Drew: I am also a nine, and just resonates so much with what Paul has already said. When I read about the nine for the first time and the need to be avoidant, I resonated deeply with that need or that shadow side of the nine to avoid everything, to avoid every hard conversation, conflict. So I could see that in myself. It was undeniable, even though I wanted to say, “No, that’s not me. No, I can engage the hard thing.” But it was just so evident in me as I looked over the course of my own life. But I also resonated with … The marker of the nine as a peacemaker, both the positive sides of that, of someone who has a deep desire for harmony, for things to be held together. As a nine, I have an intuition for seeing the connections between things and just wanting everybody to just understand the part that they play, that they belong in the big picture, whatever that picture is. Whether it’s family unit or outside of that or in the world at large, it’s just, “Hey, we don’t all have to be at each other’s throats. There’s space for all of us at this table.” That was something for me that was just like, “Yeah, that resonates deeply. I see that in myself. I’ve seen it in myself since I was a child.”
And Paul used the word porous. Everything just comes in. And I also have a very hard time identifying … Someone asked me the question, “How are you doing or how are you feeling?” It takes me a while to honestly answer that question, to locate in myself, what am I actually feeling to actually get in touch with my own center. Nines being all gut, being at the center of that gut triad, it’s like, it’s really actually hard for me to get in touch with my own body. I have to work at it, be intentional about it, and that includes getting in touch with my own anger. That’s a difficult thing for me to do.
And then I did mistype myself at first. I thought I was a three when I first encountered the enneagram. And I think the reason why is because I had a lot of threes around me, and the part about the shadow of the nine that I recoil from most is the characterization of the nine as lazy or sloth. And what I see in the three is drive and motivation. They stick at something and they do it and they achieve it. And I’m like, “I want to do that.” And also knowing that when a nine is in integration and doing well and moving toward health, nines can look like threes. They look like they’re pulling those things together. I could see that in myself, but I want to actually embody those aspects of the three. How about you, Carmen?
Carmen: I just want to say this is great hanging out with the cool kids because as somebody who most of her life has worked with the four, I really am moved by hearing all your stories. I’m like, “What if everybody in the world have been working with this?” I think the self-awareness would be just … Because the way we’re talking about it, it really is an effort. And so for me, it has been four with a five wing for most of my life. And I want to look at your question, Cassidy, because for a while there when I was much younger, because I’m the oldest of four, in a family with an abusive father, very violent, I was the helper. I was the one, “Do you need something? I’m going to get it for you before you even know you need it. Are we about to run out of something?” Whether it’s love or milk, I’m going to supply both. And my worth was all around, what do I give others?
But then I realized, wait, as I got older, when I looked back on it, I was like, “Yeah, no, that was just society telling me as a woman in the South and in evangelical circles, you got to be a helper.” But that wasn’t really who I was. I love Richard’s book because it says, “In their childhood fours have often had the experience of the present being unbearable and meaningless.” I escaped into beauty and literature and words and I wanted to be just like my heroes. I wanted to write books and I wanted to teach. Because of the trauma in my background, I thought I was terribly unique and special. I had no idea how painful that was and longing is so important. But what I realized was that I was in a great pain and this wasn’t sustainable and I need to work with this. So that’s what I appreciate, the psychology behind it trying to help us to heal our wounds.
And so one of the greatest revelations to me was that I needed to learn to mourn. So four is the individualist. Five, as you were saying, Cassidy, the investigator. So I did love to learn and everything. It was a bit complicated with dyslexia, but I love to read and such, and that helped me out a lot in balancing the four-ness, but I really had to learn how to mourn. So I appreciate, Drew, that you brought up how these help us work with the shadow, like to really own all aspects of our being. So Mike, I know you and I share this four-ness with other things. So what about you?
Mike: Oh, I so appreciate that, Carmen. Your willingness to help us find the courage to look at our wounds and find wisdom and our weird there is such a gift. It’s so cool how this tool can help us. I think for me, I mistyped a bunch. I first thought that I was a five and it was a season in life where I had a lot of public facing work. I was putting a lot of energy out into the world and I was finishing my 500-page dissertation. So I would have these moments where I would just crash and run out of extroverted energy and I would just want to run and hide in a corner. And then I realized actually I just needed my friends who were fives to teach me the balance of introversion and extroversion and the value of alone time.
Then I thought I was a two because I was working as a pastor and so I was taking care of a lot of people and I’m an oldest sibling and it’s in my nature to take care of the people around me. But then I just realized I needed my friends who were twos to teach me the balance of taking care of others and taking care of myself. And when I learned about the four’s desire to be authentic and to be who they truly were, it just struck such a deep place in me because it hit how deeply I also want everyone around me to be free, to be authentically who they are in the unique way that each and every one of us are our own reflection of God.
I love listening to how this knowledge has helped each of us in our own healing journey. Now we’ve just come out of a long exploration of Richard’s books, The Tears of Things. And in that book, we looked at anger, we looked at grief, we talked a little bit about fear and how all of this refines us in our ability to love, to show up and love well in a hurting world. I’m curious for each of you, learning about your number and using the enneagram as a tool, how has it helped you in your healing journey or helped you look at your anger or your fear or your grief and love better?
Paul: I think as I look at my own inner recesses of wrestling with my own nine-ness, and I failed to mention earlier, maybe it was my nine avoidance of my one wing. I want to make the world a better place. And I have found that my great work to do is in tapping into my own embodiment, my own feelings that are stored there. And I think a lot of my work has been tapping into the things that make me angry, the grief that I carry and how to digest that in a way so I’m not avoiding it and I’m also not spilling it to other people that I love and care for. And so it’s continual. Multiple times this week, I’ve taken a note and be like, “Ooh, there’s that sharp pain of something I’m not dealing with.” And it’s usually the same things over and over again, like let’s circle that one again and come at to it with more presence, with more intention and try to show up in a way that brings the fullness to whatever project, relationship that I’m in. Cassidy, what about you?
Cassidy: Yeah.’ Thanks for that, Paul. Carmen, something you said earlier really It triggered something for me. When I was going through the ordination process for the United Church of Christ, we had a conversation about the enneagram and in that conversation we talked about how the enneagram is often related to nurture as opposed to nature. And so I think about the work of our numbers. I think about little Carmen, little Cassidy, little Drew, little Paul, little Michael. And I think about the ways we may have first engaged in some of those coping skills. Like as a five, I would go away to feel my big feelings or to process something or to think something through. And this also makes me remember about what we’ve mentioned a couple of times already about these head types, gut types, heart types. And so as a head type, which are five, six, and sevens, we often live in our head, of course. And eight, nines and ones are gut types. Two, threes and fours are heart types.
So as a head type, I have to remember to not intellectualize everything, which let me tell you, my therapist would be thrilled to hear me say that. But I can’t think my way out or through everything. But also I have to lean on the wisdom of other types to show me how to use my full embodiment, my gut, my heart. And while some of those tactics we’ve learned are also our gifts and our skills that we bring to each other, I think for me in particular, those feelings, anger, sadness, and fear, those mostly live in the body. If I just think about those in my head, I’m not going to get anywhere with myself or with helping the world. So while my four wing certainly helps with that, I have to look to the wisdom of each other. Also what our child selves have moved through to gain these particular wounds and wisdom to share with one another. Drew, how about you?
Drew: Gosh, it’s been such a journey getting acquainted with my number. And I also, like Paul failed to mention my wing so I also am a nine wing one. Paul, you talked about this desire to make the world a better place. One of the things that learning my number and my wing and all of that has helped me identify as just, it is very hard for me to get motivated to do anything that doesn’t feel like it’s contributing to that vision. And if I can’t figure out how it is, then I disengage from it. Even just going back to, Cassidy, you mentioned childhood and the things that would get me excited. I grew up in the church, and so I was the little boy who had dreams and visions of being a pastor early because that was the thing that I could identify as this is the path to contributing to something positive in the world. And I saw that early on and it wasn’t just like an idea in my mind. It was deep in my center, the thing that I couldn’t shake.
Being able to see that about myself has been a helpful guide in terms of decision making. I have to ask the question, how can I, through committing to this, contribute to something more just, more beautiful, more whole, more loving? I have to be able to somehow answer those questions. When I think about this question in terms of all that’s happening in our world today, I want to contribute to something and there’s this other side of me that wants to avoid anything that is hard, any conflict. It’s a complete retreating into a numbness of sorts. Staying in touch with my anger, staying in touch with sadness and disappointment and frustration is part of my spiritual practice. It’s part of why I write poetry because it’s one of the ways that allows me to access those things. It’s essential for me in order for me to continue coming fully alive.
Growing up in a super conservative fundamentalist Baptist church, there was a stigma around anger. Anger is sin. So I’ve had to learn over the years that the emotion of anger is not sin, that it is actually a God-given gift to learn how to access that and to learn how to harness that anger is actually the path. It’s not a denial of it.
The other thing I’ll say too is that I was working on something with a group of people and someone told me very directly that the whole project is suffering because you aren’t stepping into the fullness of your gifts. And I recognize that that’s one of the things that a nine does is holds back, disappears into the background, doesn’t step into the fullness of the gifts that they have to offer to a space. And so for me, part of my healing and growing in my leadership is don’t be afraid to offer the fullness of your gifts into whatever space you’re in. And that’s been complicated. I think when we start talking about things like race and gender on top of the enneagram, and I have had to navigate this reality of being a Black man moving through majority white spaces and having this message sent to me that I need to be small, that I need to shrink, that I need to not occupy the fullness of the space that I can occupy. It’s been letting go of those false narratives to say, no, I’m going to step into the fullness of who I am and offer all of my gifts into this space and not shy away from that. So that’s been a part of my healing journey as well.
Carmen: I want to just say, Drew, what you just said, it shows how we have these different patterns and there are so many similarities between them because you talk about making yourself small as a Black man. And I think as a woman who grew up brown, and I’m a different number maybe, but there’s so many similarities between these. I’m thinking about how for fours, depression is something that they … I’m so glad I’m not depressed now. But you sit there and you, instead of feeling your anger and feeling your sadness and crying your tears, you take it all in and you internalize and think, “I am wrong.” And I wanted a way out of that. I was like, “This can’t be right. If God is love, help me find this.” And I remember praying to God, “Okay, yeah, I would like to write books that make sense and make beauty and contribute to the betterment of the world somehow, but you know what? I really want to be real.” And I didn’t mean I want to be real in a way you could put on Instagram. I meant I really want to be real when it’s just … You know how Dr. B used to say, “Who are you when the band goes home?” I wanted to be real where it was just Carmen with Carmen or me with the people who know me the most.
So it was super helpful to use this tool of the four to help me see I wanted to embrace the ordinary. I already had a love of that. And so the thing that made me special and isolated was trauma really. And so I let go of that. It used to be I would look at other people and think, how do they do that? And so there was an envy. It wasn’t really so deep except I would look at people and think, “I wish I could do that.” And what I realized was I was actually happy for them to do that, but I wanted to self-actualize myself. I think of Ann Ulanov who said, “When you heal yourself, you’re healing the world.”
And I’m grateful for this as a tool. And I just want to add one thing. I’m reading a Jim and Kirsten’s book on the enneagram. And one thing that they say in there, they say, “We begin to loosen our grip on fixed identity and open to a boundarylessness sense of being.” There is wisdom in learning to relate to our patterns, not as fixed truths, but as temporary forms, slowly dissolving into union. So it’s not even just becoming the best four I can be, but going beyond that personality into love.
Mike: So good. I have so much I could say because y’all are firing my imagination to such an intense degree. I will say this first, being a heart type as an enneagram four wing five, one of my greatest healing tasks is not to get swept away in my emotions. My anger and my fear and my sadness can be so intense. And then as a four with such a strong desire for authenticity, I realize I hate being put into boxes that are too small.
I’ve suffered a lot of loss and a lot of trauma in my life, but the worst pain for me is always being misunderstood or not seen. And that translates to how I feel about others. I absolutely cannot stand … It fuels my anger to a white hot rage when other folks are put into boxes or held back from becoming the fullness of who they are in their own unique identity. And at the same time, I’ve been frustrated when I feel like folks that I care about are not living out of the depth of their authenticity. And so what I’ve had to learn is that authenticity is a journey and we never get there and we’re all a little bit of a mystery to ourselves and love that in other people and sort of try to love people where they are in their own journey. But again, to recognize the ways that I can feel called to help others find freedom from the things that constrict them.
As an enneagram four, having the quest for true identity as something that drives me in my heart and in my bones, that can get narcissistic really, really quickly, particularly living in a culture where pathology has become our new mythology and self-help and self-healing has become the great story that we find ourselves in. That’s beautiful. I think there’s no greater thing, but we always need to remember to put our healing in the service of healing the world. So the real trick for me as a four is to let my quest for authenticity become a bridge and not a barrier to instead of navel-gazing, be looking down for the umbilical cord that connects me to source and to others, and to let my authenticity inspire me to see and hear the authenticity in others. But why would I tell you that when I could tell you that Howard Thurman said it so much better than I did when he talked about each of us learning to listen to the sound of the genuine in our own lives. How listening for the sound of the genuine actually connects you to other people. I love this. So I’m curious, how has the enneagram helped you understand those around you and maybe even move beyond understanding to standing in solidarity and compassion with others?
Cassidy: Yeah. To your point and everything you just shared, I think that the enneagram is a tool to move us towards solidarity. And I think in understanding my enneagram type, I better understand the roles we all play in this challenging and terribly painful world. The other day I was reading Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s letter from a Birmingham jail, and I got stuck on a line that we’ve all heard numerous times, but it just felt all the more potent. And in that letter he writes, “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality tied together in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” Fannie Lou Hamer says, “Nobody’s free until everybody’s free.” I don’t want to sound cliche because I mean this deeply. I think the enneagram reminds us of these kinds of truths because the enneagram forms a circle, the numbers are connected. What hurts you hurts me. Your wounds bring me these gifts, bring me this wisdom and vice versa.
So I think this wisdom that we can gain from each other, I think it has to begin with solidarity. It has to begin with seeing each other fully. And Michael, as you were saying, authentically. So it reminds us that we need each other. I fear that we misuse the enneagram if we don’t see it in this way. And if we only see it for a tool for self-revelation, then I think we lose the action piece of what this is all about.
Carmen: Well, it taught me that I love to listen. There’s almost nothing I’d rather do. I find other people endlessly fascinating. I guess for me, I think the world’s systems are created to not remind us that the world is sacred. Instead, it’s more about money and greed and status. And so I really appreciate this deep listening that I feel is a part of my essential thread. And it reminds me of Catherine of Genoa who said, “My deepest me is God.” And she actually said something a bit more detailed than that. She said [foreign language 01:13:16]. But what she’s literally saying is the deepest part of me is divine. And that is something that I try to listen for in everybody. And I read recently that Ram Dass had on his altar photos of people who were hard to love saying that until he could love those people that were hard to love as much as he loved the people he found easy to love, then he wasn’t really loving. And so this for me is what For really asked me to do, not just love the students who are easy, but to love all the students. That’s one example.
Drew: The enneagram has been a tool for me that has helped me discover just the depths of my own self, that there is a lot to me. And to discover that about myself is also to discover that that’s true of everyone else on the planet. I think of James Baldwin’s quote from his book, The Devil Finds Work. He says, “To encounter oneself is to encounter the other, and this is love. If I know that my soul trembles, I know that yours does too. And if I can respect this, both of us can live.” I think the enneagram has been such a deep, beautiful invitation into that reality that part of loving my neighbor … And Jesus said this, right? Is learning to know and then love who I am, but also that moves me, that should move me not to be so insular, navel gazy and focused on myself, but actually moves me toward my neighbor, toward the other, toward those whom I might have put in the category of enemy. It’s been a beautiful invitation for me in that way.
Mike: I love this so much, friends. It’s such a profound reminder that each person is a gift. Richard says that the enneagram gives us nine different doorways to knowing God. Richard talks about the way of the wound and this reminder that each one of us at some point in life is wounded and that wound might actually set us out on our wandering. It might shape the path of our life. It might give us our wondering, the questions that become ours to ask an answer. But in staying faithful to that, it also leads us to our wisdom, our unique wisdom to share with others. And I think that leads us to our work in the world. And we’re talking about the enneagram at such a particular moment in time. There’s so much hurt and there’s so much injustice and so many of our listeners are looking at everything that’s broken in the world saying, “What can I do? I’m just one person. How can I help and how can I make a difference?”
I’m curious, how do you think the enneagram in putting us in touch with our wounds and our wisdom can help us discern what is our unique work to do in the world? How’s it guided you in doing that and how do you think it can help our listeners as we go through this season?
Cassidy: I think about that Baldwin quote, Drew, that you just shared. In that sense, the enneagram really points us to the body of Christ, points us to another way of looking at the body of Christ, another way of living into the body of Christ, another way of understanding what it might look like for us to really give and receive these vastness of gifts between us. So for me, as a five, one who’s often introverted and solitary, it is crucial for me to get uncomfortable, to do that shadow work and grow up in my number, to do the growth work, to show up and get uncomfortable so I can live out who I am in the healthiest way possible. And that’s just it. Living out our numbers does mean recognizing our gifts, of course, also, but the enneagram can help us to hone in on that skillset or to grow more deeply aware of that art giftedness so we can grow up in that and really show up for each other.
Mike: So you’re saying it’s not the menneagram, it’s the weeniogram.
Cassidy: No. No. We’re not saying that.
Mike: I’ve been trying to work that into the script for so long. I’m so sorry. Carmen, you were about to say something brilliant.
Carmen: I love that. For me, it’s definitely helped me in the contemplative path because it’s a psychological tool really. It brings psychology into the conversation, even if we don’t quite explicitly name it with its history and everything, from Evagrius to Ule and different ways that people were trying to figure out their lives. And I think self-knowledge is always worth it. As Jim Finley often says, and as the Gospel of Thomas says, as hard as self-knowledge can be sometimes, it’s even worse not to get it, like not to want it. And after seeing the way my father lived his life, one of my main goals was I wanted to be somebody who was genuinely kind to others. And then I learned along the way using the enneagram and such that that kindness I was extending to others, I didn’t have much of it for myself. The more I can feel at home with myself, then the more I can feel at home and community and enrich the community. So yeah, for me, it’s all about really self-knowledge, which means every person knowledge. We’re all connected. It’s so easy to forget. How about you, Mike?
Mike: In helping me find my lever in a place to stand, my place to make a difference, I know that it’s going to be connected to helping others be free, to be their own wonderful, weird selves, and to be whole and be healthy. And I know that I can listen and learn and also see how my wounds can trip me up and put me into a place where I’m not being sustainable, where I’m enacting my wounds on the people around me. It’s a process. It’s a process. But part of it is recognizing that I can’t do everything and I can give myself permission to lean into the things that are natural for me. I had a mentor who used to say, “The pain that you can feel is the pain that you can heal.” And that had a double meaning. The first thing is you have to be willing to feel the pain if you’re going to heal it, and that takes courage. And then the second is that the pain that you feel most deeply will very often be connected to your work, but that only works if I’m listening deeply to the people around me, so that doesn’t become an excuse to let myself off the hook. It’s an ongoing process.
Drew: Yeah. For me, I wrote a short poem that really connects to this question of how’s the enneagram helped you find your work. It’s short, and it simply says, “When I know who I am with nothing to prove, it frees me to do the work of love. When I know who I am with nothing to prove, it frees me to do the work of love.” And that sense of knowing myself deeply, getting to know who I am, getting to know what are the things that make me come alive? What are the things that break my heart? There’s something about, as Carmen said, that self-knowledge that actually frees me up to be engaged in the work of loving the world, fully as myself. Not as a ploy to fill something in me that I’m searching to get from them, but truly to love them without a need to prove myself to somebody. I often say to myself, “You have nothing to prove, nothing to protect, nothing to possess.” There’s an openness that I can love with when I’m deeply grounded in who I am.
The inspiration for that poem was in John chapter 13 when Jesus washes the feet of his disciples. And there’s a verse at the beginning of John 13 where John writes, Jesus … And I’m paraphrasing here, but he essentially says, Jesus, knowing who he was, knowing where he came from and where he was going, got up to wash their feet. There was something about Jesus’ deep knowing of who he was and the fullness of who he was that then freed him to get on his hands and knees and wash feet and do the work of love that was his to do at that moment in time. And so I think the enneagram has been a tool for me in that aspect of love of saying, “How do I get to know myself deeply so that I can be free to love others without strings attached?”
Mike: I love that so, so, so much. Speaking as an enneagram four who just doesn’t like to be put in boxes, the enneagram, any typology can be a way for us to box other people up and shut them down and assume that we know them, or it can be an invitation to get curious. It can be ways that we do what we just did, which is use it as tools to listen deeply to each other and try to share parts of our own experience. Nothing would break my heart more than if our listeners just tune into the episode that they feel like they relate to as their number. This journey, as we go through the nine faces of God and the nine invitations to self-understanding and understanding others, in each number, each one of us will find an invitation to love ourselves more deeply. Each one of us in each number will find someone that we love. Each one of us in each number will find something that frustrates us about ourselves, and each one of us in each number will find someone that frustrates us. And so much of it, every single piece of it is an invitation to love and to learn and to listen deeply.
So I’m so excited to be taking this journey with all of you, with Richard, with our guests, with our wonderful listeners. Friends, would you give everybody a one sentence hope for our journey and our time together over the next few months?
Carmen: May you be open to curiosity, blessed by self-compassion, and find joy in letting go of the small ego.
Drew: When you know who you are with nothing to prove, it frees you to do the work of love. May that be your experience of our journey together.
Cassidy: May we all take on and have the audacity to humble ourselves, to know ourselves, and to lean into the action of solidarity that knowing ourselves calls us into.
Mike: May our wounds lead us out on our wandering. May they cause us to wonder. May our wounds lead us to our wisdom and our work in the world. May they help us find our weird, and above all, may they connect us to everyone else in our wonderful human family.
Thanks folks for joining us. We’re looking forward to taking this journey with you together. And just a parting thought, special thanks to our friends in the band, U2, who recently released this song called The Tears of Things, inspired by Richard’s latest book. You can find it in their EP, Days of Ash, all the places that music live, Apple, Spotify, YouTube. Thanks, friends.
Corey Wayne: Thanks for listening to this podcast by the Center for Action and Contemplation, an educational nonprofit that introduces seekers to the contemplative Christian path of transformation. To learn more about our work, visit us at cac.org. Everything Belongs is made possible, thanks to the generosity of our supporters and the shared work of …
Mike: Mike Petrow.
Paul: Paul Swanson.
Drew: Drew Jackson.
Carmen: Carmen Acevedo Butcher.
Jenna Keiper: Jenna Keiper.
Izzy Spitz: Izzy Spitz.
Megan Hare: Megan Hare.
Sara Palmer: Sara Palmer.
Dorothy Abrahams: Dorothy Abrahams.
Brandon Strange: Brandon Strange.
Vanessa Yee: Vanessa Yee.
Cassidy: Cassidy Hall.
Corey Wayne: And me, Corey Wayne. The music you hear is composed and provided by our friends, Hammock. And we’d also like to thank Sound On Studios for all of their work in post-production. From the high desert of New Mexico, we wish you peace and every good.