The Weeds and Wheat of our Enneagram Type

So when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared as well. Matthew 13. 24-30

The elevator speech description of the Enneagram is it's an ancient personality typing system that helps people understand who they are and what makes them tick. I am sure you have heard the term tossed about in various settings, and many of you know what it is and how it works. When I read the gospel for today, it occurred to me that studying the Enneagram is a way to recognize the grain and the weeds that we are made of and how to cast the weeds aside and cultivate the grain.

One of the best books I have read about the Enneagram is The Road Back to You by Ian Morgan Cron and Suzanne Stabile. It is a user friendly guide to the nine personality types which indicate how we were wired for survival as little kids. Our personality is made up of "innate qualities, coping strategies, conditioned reflexes and defense mechanisms which informed the behaviors necessary to please our parents, to fit in and relate well to our friends and to satisfy the expectations of our culture and to get our basic needs met."* The Greek word for mask is persona which helps us understand that sometimes our personality masks our true selves, thus cluttering our hearty grain with idle weeds.

Frederick Buechner poignantly describes what happens when we lose touch with our authentic selves saying, "The original, shimmering self gets buried so deep that most of us end up hardly living out of it at all. Instead we live out of all the other selves, which we are constantly putting on and taking off like coats and hats against the world's weather."

The purpose of the Enneagram is "to develop self-knowledge and learn how to recognize and dis-identify with the parts of our personalities (the weeds) that limit us so that we can be reunited with our truest and best selves."* And Thomas Merton refers to our truest and best selves as "that pure diamond, blazing with the invisible light of heaven."

If you are interested in self understanding and growing beyond the self defeating dimensions of your personality...if you would like to enrich the grain in the fields of your life and collect and bind and burn the weeds...take a look at the Enneagram, study the types, identify your "mask" and I promise (speaking from self-experience) you will notice a difference in your life as you see yourself with the same delight, pride and expectation God sees you with every moment!

*The Road Back to You