Prayer - Lesson 11

Professor James Houston

Prayer

th732-11

Enneagram, Fear and Addiction<

Lesson Transcript

Of course, the Enneagram is very helpful for us to be wiser in our relational life with other people. It does give us tolerance and understanding that is good for us. The only thing is there are certain dangers that you should be warned about and perhaps one of these is that this gives us a kind of self-directed knowledge that we’re really going to the Enneagram to know how to behave wisely. And so in a culture that has become so individualistic, the Enneagram becomes like a tech tool. It becomes something that makes us self-sufficient about our social wisdom with other people and that’s dangerous. And of course, it's worse if it gives us self-sufficiency about our own prayer life. So then the danger increases with that. But on the other hand, if we want to have more self-awareness of what lies in the basement of our emotional life that we don’t often see and only occasionally visit then it does help us to realise that this gives me more self-reflection. So that’s the ambiguities that we face with the Enneagram.

Now, in the light of this, one of the ways in which it helps us to reflect on ourselves is that these nine points, which is what the Enneagram means: [enneos gramos 00:01:54] or nine points are really nine forms of addiction. And so in that sense, we relive with addiction. Now, as I'm writing a book with a neuroscientist that I think I referred to before, Theodore George and myself are writing on the theme that he has explored that in the lower thalamus he's located the basic emotion of the human being and that basic emotion is fear. And it's fear that triggers our addictions because we want a momentary pleasure that will divert us subconsciously from always being afraid. And that momentary pleasure can be an addiction.

Well, if you can join that with the Enneagram, the Enneagram helps you to spot what is your addictive tendency. Number one is the addiction to be a perfectionist. And what the perfectionist is really doing is avoiding the cellarage of fear, of anger. The perfectionist is afraid of both the anger of others and of one's own emotional frustrations. So one has to be in control of what one does. That’s the fear-driven fear of the perfectionist. Nothing has to be messy. And so there are people who, of course, drive you crazy because their kitchen has to be spotless or their bedroom has to be perfectly made up, whatever it is, or you can have perfection in anything imaginable.

The second type of personality is the giver. The giver is anxious to reveal self-need and so, in a sense, the ploy of giving is a denial. It's a cover-up of one's own self-need. The giver yearns to be needed, yearns to be acclaimed, yearns to be useful. I once remember an old friend of mine's father, he was a journalist and you'd think he was street savvy. If you admired his tie, he would take it off and give it to you. If you admired his shirt, he would have taken it off. It was almost an addiction that he had got caught up in giving. As soon as you'd admire something, he was ready to give it to you. Now, is that true generosity or is that neurotic? And so this again reveals a great need.

Number three is the performer, the doer. What the doer is afraid of is failure, so actively is engaged in performing and doing, of seeking one's salvation in activism. It's the very characteristic type of our culture today. It's why there's so much of our society so functional and puts such a high premium on a functional identity. Number four is the romantic, the idealist, the artist, all different forms. But what the romantic is afraid of is the ordinary world. It's afraid of Rembrandt's still life, of ordinariness. So they fabricate. They create an extraordinary, unreal world, an idealistic world. And it's one of the characteristics that we see in so much art today - it's abstractionism. It's a face. It's afraid of depicting reality. And so the result is that you get all this impressionism and all this abstractionism. They're both two sides of the same coin and these two schools that fight vehemently one against the other. And so the Don Juan is that kind of romantic who's always looking for beautiful women. There's the artist who's always chasing after one's own identity in art and never finding it and talking incoherently to other people of what they're seeing in their own art that nobody sees. They really end up a very frustrated breed of people.

And then there's the observer, the number five. It's the person that we've already talked about that is like Kafka in his castle. He loves abstraction. He loves ideologies. He loves to play chess and get absorbed in computer games. He's probably a mathematician. I remember once we had an international congress of mathematicians at the University of British Columbia and we were told these were the top mathematicians in the world. And what did they do? They said there are only four of us that can talk to each other. Well, it's very dangerous to find that there are only four people on the globe that you can relate to. And that’s what it becomes to be a famous mathematician. These are the perennial students. They're always studying, always observing.

The number six is a much more attractive person: the responsible. These are loyal. They're dependable. They're the civil servants of society, though they become darn bureaucrats if you're not careful. They're the deacons of our churches, the pillars of our Church. But what is it they're afraid of? They're afraid of change. They're ultra-conservative. They're traditionalists. And so the law of the Medes and the Persians will never be changed as long as they're in charge. And then there's number seven, which is just the opposite. These are the fun-lovers. These are the people who are greedy for change. They love new sensations. What are they afraid of? Pain, suffering. They can't tolerate it. So every job they do has to be baptised as fun and then they’ll do it.

Young Life has built up a whole ministry on a fun culture. It's fun to be in Young Life. So even their leaders are perhaps as retarded as Peter Pan and we see the chaos that’s happened over their administration. And of course, the whole thing is in a bit of a wreck today. I remember once walking on the beach in California outside of Los Angeles and saying good morning to a lady in her, I would say, mid-40s. Oh, I said, you like to be on the beach? Of course I do. It's such fun to see the new roller coming in. And do you know? Every one is different. So she spent her life looking at the different breaks of the waves on the beach because each one was different. And that’s an awful lot of Californian culture is 'What's new? What’s different?'

And then there's number eight: the controller, the boss. What's he afraid of? Weakness. He lives in a chaotic world. He has to be on top of things. He's got to control things. He's got to manage things. So any threat to the loss of control and these people will get into a panic. And then there's the number nine. He's the mediator. He's the opposite. He's afraid of conflict. He's the kind of guy that I was: wallpaper. It's peace at any price, even if it means being a doormat.

What's wrong with all these people? They're all frustrated because they don’t have a valid identity. They don’t have an identity in Christ. So when we look again at these different categories, we recognise that three of them are much more head-centred, three are much more heart-centred and shall we say that three more are stomach-centred or gut-centred. And so we see that you can now have different quadrants where you get these different kind of people. And of course, you can see that the same thing happens with their prayer life as they have with their social relations.

One book that has been written by Barbara Metz and John Burchill called The Enneagram and Prayer and this I find more useful because it does give you insights that are helpful for your own prayer life. And so they make the suggestion that really there are three categories of personality or indeed of temperament. There are those that focus on meditation and there are those who are expressing prayer and there are those who have quiet prayer. If we start with the latter, it's what the Celtic spirituality call kything. To kythe with somebody is simply to have a quiet association of spirit with that person. It's what they called having Anam Cara, having a soul friend. And a soul friend is somebody you don’t need to talk to, like a lover. They understand each other. They communicate with each other in silence. And that’s why when I go to Japan, I discover that one of the richest forms of prayer for Japanese Christians is just kything. They feel, of course, with each other and they feel that to ask for an explanation or a description is like something being very ignorant. 'Don’t you sense it? Don’t you really feel it?' That’s how they do.

And then, of course, the other forms of prayer that this book by Barbara Metz is suggesting that we know more about expressive prayer. We've talked a lot about it. And what's the difference between…? And this is a confusion for many of us in our vocabulary. What's the difference between meditation and contemplation? It was something that when we come to in another course we'll find was the tension that Teresa of Avila had. Meditation is the active use of the mind as you're, say, looking at scripture. You’re meditating on it in a meditative way day and night, which we should do. But contemplation is being absorbed by the atmosphere of it. It's being embraced in the arms of the beloved. And so contemplation is really an experience of being beloved. I don’t need to say anything when His arms are around me.

There are other books, however, and there's obviously a big industry now around the Enneagram that’s been developed and I haven't read many of them recently. But this is going back a decade perhaps in my own studies on this, but there's Richard Rohr, who's very popular these days, and he's called his book Discovering the Enneagram. And he's perhaps got more enraptured with the Enneagram than most of the other Christian books that we've talked about. And so the result is he does not give you any critique or any warning, as I have done in this lecture, about the careful use of the Enneagram. He just absorbs it hook, line and sinker.

Or again, there's Don Richard Riso, who’s written two books. His first book is Personality Types: Using the Enneagram for Self-Discovery. And that I say is again a good thing when you're discovering your addiction. Or there's another one that he's written, Understanding the Enneagram: The Practical Guide to Personality Types. Or again, there's Margaret Keyes, who’s written a book called Emotions and the Enneagram: Working Through Your Shadow Life Script. And of course, that’s good because our shadow life is our hidden weaknesses. We have hidden addictions, but we also have therefore hidden weaknesses. And to be able to enter into more awareness, as we've said before, of the basement of our lives, that’s good that we should have.