Good morning…
It is bittersweet for me to help craft words for the final email sent out to our August Enneagram class. Included here are the notes from last week’s teaching, the focus for this week’s lesson, and a link to register for fall classes at Northside Church, which begin the week of September 9th. What a joy it has been to learn with a room full of wide-eyed, wonderful women. Please join us if you find yourself available at noon today.
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Week 4 – Enneagram: A Tool For Spiritual Growth
Monday, August 26
Location: FELLOWSHIP HALL – Northside Church, 2799 Northside Dr NW, Atlanta, GA 30305
Focus: Growing into our true, God-designed self takes a lifetime. Hopefully, up until our very last day on earth, we will be learning something new about our God, our self, and how we are uniquely wired to be a loving, colorful part of the body of Christ, a body through which God promises to heal hurts in our broken world. Today, Sue Allen will lead our discussion about what influences hinder our spiritual growth and what daily disciplines help us to gradually grow more deeply saturated with the character of Christ.
What’s Next:
One of the ways to continue growing spiritually is to join another class offered through our Women’s Ministry at Northside Church. The two books Sue is teaching this semester are meant to encourage women of all ages and all stages to grow toward spiritual maturity through collaborative conversation. Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s beloved “Gift From The Sea” will be discussed alongside Sue Allen’s original manuscript “With God Weather Life.” This class will meet at Northside in room 308 on Thursday 10:30 to 12:00 pm, with inexpensive childcare available. Those interested in a more intense, more advanced read might enjoy Richard Rohr’s “Falling Upward: A Spirituality For The Two Halves Of Life.” Sue teaches two sections of this book in her living room in Vinings, Mondays 1:00 to 2:30 pm or Fridays 10:30 to 12:00 pm. With limited space in her home, we have eight slots available on the Monday roster and four slots available on the Friday roster. Our ministry to women hosts a wide range of weekly classes taught by different teachers, on various topics, meeting all times of day or night. Please check out the class descriptions below and sign up for a class that tickles your fancy. Click here to register.
If you are interested in co-ed Disciple Bible Study classes, please reach out to Rev. Catherine Boothe Olson and she will connect you to the class that is just right for you. Starting on September 8, she will be facilitating a Sunday School class with James Johnson at 9am on Adam Hamilton’s, “Half Truths: God Helps Those Who Help Themselves and Other Things the Bible Doesn’t Say.” Additional Discipleship opportunities can also be located in the Northside Discipleship Guide.
Growing in grace, love, and gratitude –
Catherine & Sue
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…Sue…
P.S. Because some of you who missed last week’s class asked for the notes, I am included them in their entirety here. (Sorry I do not know how to attach them in a separate link.)
Week 3: The Enneagram As Tool For Spiritual Growth
An Organic Three-Part Model
Welcome. I am excited to share with you a Three-Part Enneagram Model that God has been developing through me over these past few years. At the end of each section, we will take time to integrate what God is teaching us personally. We will also have an opportunity to share our insights with others nearby. This will be an interactive, collaborative time of learning together.
I am Sue Allen and since I am a 9 on the Enneagram, my key drive is to avoid conflict, to make peace, to negotiate a middle ground between two opposing forces. I am a psychology major. On one hand, “psyche” in its original language means “soul,” so psychology is the study of the soul, the art of exploring our human nature. On the other hand, I am fascinated by our spiritual nature, our Christian faith, a study of the Bible that shapes our everyday life. To me, the Enneagram is a dynamic tool that helps me make peace with my authentic self and the different people around me.
Over the past few years, I have prayerfully studied the Enneagram. Because as a 9, I need to know things deep down in my gut. I am body-oriented in my approach to learning, God has grown a hands-on model that helps me to understand my spiritual growth and the spiritual growth of others. To me, the roots of the Enneagram go way back to the beginning of time. Let me explain this first part of our three-part model.
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light(Genesis 1:1-3, NIV).
In the beginning [before all time] was the Word (Christ), and the Word was with God, and the Word was God Himself. He was [continually existing] in the beginning [co-eternally] with God. All things were made and came into existence through Him; and without Him not even one thing was made that has come into being. In Him was life [and the power to bestow life], and the life was the Light of men(John 1:1-4, AMP).
And the Word (Christ) became flesh, and lived among us; and we [actually] saw His glory, glory as belongs to the [One and] only begotten Son of the Father, [the Son who is truly unique, the only One of His kind, who is] full of grace and truth (absolutely free of deception)(John 1:14, AMP).
So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.” Then God said, “I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food”(Genesis 1:27-29, NIV).
As the Creator of our universe placed a seed of divine, dynamic DNA in each seed-bearing person to be sustained by seed-bearing plants, the image of a bulb buried in the ground becomes a symbol of spiritual growth for me.Again he (Jesus) said, “What shall we say the kingdom of God is like, or what parable shall we use to describe it? It is like a mustard seed, which is the smallest of all seeds on earth. Yet when planted, it grows and becomes the largest of all garden plants, with such big branches that the birds can perch in its shade”(Mark 4:30-32, NIV).
Be God’s Bulb
The concept the unique bulb of a True Self implanted within us by God has its fingerprints all over the Bible and all over the pages of contemplative Christian writers. Many of the books we study in our Women’s Ministry each semester attempt to put words to this invisible, blossoming power. The hidden life of Christ (Kitty Crenshaw and Dr. Cathy Snapp). Our True Self (David Benner). Self with a capital “S” (C.G. Jung). Potentiality striving to become realized in us (John Sanford). The life that is mine to live (Parker Palmer). Our listening soul (Jan Johnson). Our waiting heart (Sue Monk Kidd). The Divine Essence, our Essential self, the ground of Being in us, the Sacred Center, the Spirit (Don Richard Riso and Russ Hudson).
Rooted in the Bible, these wise authors bring to life the organic growth of God popping through the soil of us. The image of God within us, Imago dei (Genesis 1:27). The inner kingdom of Jesus (Luke 17:21). In Christ we are a new creation (2 Corinthians 5:17). We have the mind of Christ (1 Corinthians 2:16). Christ is in us (Colossians 1:27). Christ comes alive in us (Philippians 1:21). The Spirit of God gives us life (Romans 8:9-10). The fullness of Christ matures in us (Ephesians 4:13). We grow up into Christ, the head (Ephesians 4:15). We no longer live, Christ lives in us (Galatians 2:20).
Part of why it is hard to discern our Enneagram number is that it is a living, breathing entity, growing beneath the surface of us. The DNA of our True Self is tucked out of eyesight, encouraging us to wait patiently beneath the dark soil of the unconscious, not seeing, not knowing, not understanding exactly who God has designed us to be. “Before I made you in your mother’s womb, I knew you. Before you were born, I chose you for a special work” (Jeremiah 1:5a, ERV).
“I sometimes think of the True Self as a bulb,” writes Sue Monk Kidd, “a bulb buried in the dark ground of my unconscious, seeking to push into the conscious light above. You’ve perhaps noticed how windows plants wind and grow toward the light, pressing their leaves against the pane. This turning toward the sun has a scientific name; it’s called heliotropism. Jung spoke of a “human heliotropism.” The True Self seeks the light, winding and growing toward realization, pressing against the window pane of consciousness.” (When The Heart Waits, 51)
“Beneath or inside the life we lead every day is another life,” says the John Tarrant quote in the notes I borrowed from our 93-year-old friend, Christian mystic Betty Skinner. For years Betty used these notes to facilitate spiritual retreats on the Enneagram, the ancient study of the nine basic types of people. Now as I co-teach a six week class on the Enneagram, we wade into the stream where Betty’s soul has been swimming for years.
“This unseen life runs like a river beneath the city, beneath work, family, ambition,” continues Tarrant in The Light Inside the Dark. “In the helper-skelter, in the rush to get an education, to make a career, to make a family, to find material success, to hurry, to do, to survive, this interior life is often subjugated or paved over… But as we awaken and grow accustom to the grace of gradual illumination, the interior life is unstoppable; it comes up in loveliness like jonquils out of fallen snow.”
As we settle into silence and solitude with God, we sense our True Self rooting like a bulb, coming up like jonquils out of fallen snow: May He grant you out of the riches of His glory, to be strengthened and spiritually energized with power through His Spirit in your inner self, [indwelling your innermost being and personality] (Ephesians 3:16, AMP). I am captivated by the concept of God strengthening His Spirit in our innermost being, energizing with Divine power our unique personality.
Our True Self is as natural and deeply congruent as a bulb being rooted before it sprouts. The seed of our “special work” gradually grows into our genuine “I” as God loves us each into our best selves. Tragically, too often we settle for pretending, and our truly authentic self lies dormant, undiscovered.
Take time now to quietly consider what resonates with you in this teaching. I will play instrumental music from my friend Dana Cunningham as we allow ourselves to settle into our thoughts, feelings, insights. Draw this image in the space below, noticing anything that intrigues you, confuses you, surprises you, or excites you about this material.
Level Two Of God’s Multi-dimensional Model
God’s initial insights have grown into a multi-dimensional model as the Spirit sparked fresh insight for me.
Creator. Spirit. Christ. Light in darkness. These are the building blocks of the LORD who gives life. Then when Creator/Spirit/Christ decided to put a fractal of divine DNA within each one of us, we are hardwired to grow up to be a living, breathing facet of God. It’s like God went through a paint book of colors, deciding which color best fits God’s healing purposes.
For You formed my innermost parts; You knit me [together] in my mother’s womb. I will give thanks and praise to You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made; wonderful are Your works, and my soul knows it very well. My frame was not hidden from You, when I was being formed in secret, and intricately and skillfully formed [as if embroidered with many colors] in the depths of the earth. Your eyes have seen my unformed substance; and in Your book were all written the days that were appointed for me, when as yet there was not one of them [even taking shape] Psalm 139:13-16 (AMP).
“Being yourself would not make any spiritual sense if your uniqueness were not of immense value to God. But each person is exactly that – of inestimable value to God,” says David Benner in The Gift of Being Yourself: The Sacred Call to Self-Discovery. “We should never be tempted to think that growth in Christlikeness reduces our uniqueness. While some Christian visions of the spiritual life imply that as we become like Christ we look more and more like each other, such a cultic expectation of loss of individuality has nothing in common with genuine Christian spirituality. Paradoxically, as we become more and more like Christ we become more uniquely our own true self.” We each become stronger in our unique shade of Christlikeness and we grow up closer to one another, more vibrantly the body of Christ on earth.
“…there are many false ways of achieving uniqueness,” says Benner. “These all result from attempts to create a self rather than receive the gift of my self-in-Christ. But the uniqueness that comes from being our true self is not a uniqueness of our making. Identity is never simply a creation. It is always a discovery. True identity is always a gift from God. The desire for uniqueness is a spiritual desire. So too is the longing to be authentic. These are not simply psychological longings, irrelevant to the spiritual journey. Both are the response of spirit to Spirit – the Holy Spirit calling us home to our place and identity in God. Being most deeply your unique self is something that God desires, because your true self is grounded in Christ. God created your uniqueness and seeks to restore you to that uniqueness in Christ. Finding and living out your true self is fulfilling your destiny.”
There are different kinds of spiritual gifts, but they all come from the same Spirit. There are different ways to serve the same Lord, and we can each do different things. Yet the same God works in all of us and helps us in everything we do. The Spirit has given each of us a special way of serving others(1 Corinthians 12:4-7, (CEV).
And yet in God’s divine, everlasting plan, “There is a God shaped vacuum in the heart of every man which cannot be filled by any created thing, but only by God, the Creator, made known through Jesus,” says Blaise Pascal.Each of the nine Enneagram numbers have a missing piece, a God-shaped vacuum that can be filled by only God. Our key drive for more draws us close to God for completion. And I am certain that God, who began the good work within you, will continue his work until it is finally finished on the day when Christ Jesus returns (Philippians 1:6, NLT).
“…God makes available inside us all that we need to grow and become whole,” Sue Monk Kidd writes. “Jesus himself referred to this truth when he spoke of the kingdom of God as a self-sowing seed. It’s ‘as if a man should scatter seed upon the ground, and should sleep and rise night and day, and the seed should sprout and grow, he knows not how. The earth produces of itself, first the blade, then the ear, then the full grain’(Mark 4:26-28). I love those little-explored words of Jesus. They tell me that the hidden potential and fullness of life is within me. My part is to wait in creative and expectant ways for it to unfold, attentive to the process.”
Sue continues: “Farmers are usually good at grasping Jesus’ concept of the self-sowing seed. They know that the flower is contained in the seed. Everything is present there. One can only wait and watch and be present to it as it blossoms. This is an important principle in waiting: coming to the enormous realization that there are seed forces within us. The potential for wholeness, Life with a capital L, is fully here. We don’t have to go out in conquest and make it happen. We can simply let it happen, consciously.”
Our study of the Enneagram is intended to nurture the self-sowing seed of True Self God implanted in us as it grows from our dark unconscious into an increasingly conscious process. Take time to consider the words and the images embedded in this Enneagram model. Please take time to draw on the page a picture of this model, including the facets which move you the most.
The Third Part Of This Hands-On Enneagram Model
“Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid,” says the Albert Einstein quote at the bottom of my friend’s email. Thought-provoking. Right?
Our True Self is born in the skin of a baby and we are encased in an unchosen bubble in this imperfect world. Listen to a poem I wrote when I was 20something, entitled “Shoulds” Silence.
This poem combines with the 3 P’s Brene Brown talks about, pressure to Please. Perfect. Perform. And Christian mystic Betty Skinner 5 C’s – Compare. Compete. Control. Complain. Criticize. When we feel ourselves being controlled by these compulsions, it is a good indication we are acting our tof our false self. When we feel the Spirit of God draining away and our selfish selves taking over, it is time to surrender, to lay down our self, and allow the life of Christ to saturate us more and more.
“In all of creation, identity is a challenge only for humans. A tulip knows exactly what it is. It is never tempted by false ways of being. Nor does it face complicated decisions in the process of being. So it is with dogs, rocks, stars, amoebas, electrons and all other things. All give glory to God by being exactly what they are. For in being what God means them to be, they are obeying him. Humans, however, encounter a more challenging existence. We think. We consider options. We decide. We act. We doubt. Simple being is tremendously difficult to achieve and fully authentic being is extremely rare.
Body and soul contain thousands of possibilities out of which you can build many identities. But in only one of these will you find your true self that has been hidden in Christ from all eternity. Only in one will you discover your unique vocation and deepest fulfillment. But, as Dag Hammarskjold argues, you will never find this “until you have excluded all those superficial and fleeting possibilities of being and doing with which you toy out of curiosity or wonder or greed, and which hinder you from casting anchor in the experience of the mystery of life, and the consciousness of the talent entrusted to you which is your I.”
Benner continues: “We all live searching for that one possible way of being that carries with it the gift of authenticity. We are most conscious of this search for identity during adolescence, when it takes front stage. At this stage of life we try on identities like clothing, looking for a style of being that fits with how we want to be seen. But even long after adolescence has passed, most adults know the occasional feeling of being a fraud – a sense of being not what they pretend to be but rather precisely what they pretend not to be. With a little reflection, must of us can become aware of the masks the we first adopt as strategies to avoid feelings of vulnerability but that have become a part of our social self. Tragically, we settle easily for pretense, and a truly authentic self often seems illusory.”
Benner concludes: “There is, however, a way of being for each of us that is as natural and deeply congruent as the life of the tulip. Beneath the roles and masks likes a possibility of self that is as unique as a snowflake. It is an originality that has existed since God first loved us into existence. Our true self-in-Christ is the only self that will support authenticity. It and it alone provides an identity that is eternal. Finding that unique self is, as noted by Thomas Merton, the problem on which all our existence, peace and happiness depend. Nothing is more important, for if we find our true self we find God, and if we find God, we find our most authentic self.” (Benner’s The Gift Of Being Yourself: The Sacred Call To Self-Discovery, 16-17)
Discovering our True Self takes time and patience, two things we often do not make room for in our busy lives. The world values, fast, forceful, flamboyant. God’s power grows in peace, partnership, and patient waiting.
Have you heard about the artist who was sculpting a swan figure from a solid block of ice? When asked how she created her masterpiece she simply replied, “I just chip away everything that is not a swan.”
I think our True Self is revealed through a similar process. Life chisels away our non-essentials to expose the core of what is really true. This True Self then stands firm, uniquely gorgeous, as a one-of-a-kind ice figure. Solid. Inspiring. Breathtaking in beauty. Before it gradually melts to water the ground upon which we sit.
