Gifts and Destruction

So this season of my sabbatical I'm focusing on more specific soul-level work and evaluation. My goal is to have a more clear-eyed understanding of who I am (one definition of humility is simply seeing ourselves as we really are) and to be able to evaluate more faithfully what my thirteen years in ministry has been about.

To do this work, I'm reading about the Enneagram. It's basically an A.P. (Advanced Placement, for those of you for whom high school was a long time ago) Myers-Briggs.

It's a pretty interesting and thorough-going look at personality and ability and motives and how all our baggage and gifts come together for good and/or for ill. The book I'm reading recommends that people engage with the Enneagram sometime in their mid-30's to late-forties, after they've had some time to establish some life-patterns and perhaps become discontent with those patterns.

It's helpful for me that the book I'm reading was written by Richard Rohr, a Catholic Franciscan priest. He is good to tie in a Christian world-view along with biblical characters and saints throughout the ages who fit the different types.

I've just finished reading an overview of the nine types that they sketch out. I'm still trying to figure out where I "fit."

But the core insight that I really resonate with is that our gifts, passions and power that give us the most life also contain the seeds of our self-destruction. Rohr insists on the centrality of repentance and redemption of every type (or "number" in the Eneagram structure) in order for these gifts to mature and bear the fruit that they were made for.

I have seen this already at work in my life. My places of greatest strength and gifting are the places where I'm most tempted towards self-serving and independence rather than dependence on the Spirit and help to do the work faithfully.