The Sacred Enneagram

On the Enneagram overall:
For starters, I really do think the Enneagram is more useful than the various other personality tests. Whenever I take one of the tests (Myers Briggs, StrengthsFinder, etc.) they only feel superficially helpful. It's good to pause to consider the answers to their various questions, but it always feels like it's regurgitating information I just gave it: “Do I like reading? Yes I do. Look at that, it says I'm a reader!” But the Enneagram does get over that basic level by focusing instead on underlying desires and fear, rather than just personalities. The Enneagram doesn't repeat the things you just told it, it helps you puzzle out your motives, which is much more helpful. You could be an introvert, extravert, or whatever and be any of the 9 Enneagram types. It's the first typing system that felt insightful, like I actually learned something about how I engage with the world on a deeper level. It's been useful for both my own reflection and for relating to other people.

On this book:

This isn't a typical 3-star review. There's some good things here, and even some great things. Most of my 3-star reviews are mixed, in the sense that “I liked the plot, but the dialogue is meh.” This was different. A third of it was great, but the rest was really a slog. For me, the E has value because it is explanative. With a little bit of research, I felt like learning that I'm a Type 1 was really illuminating. Although I knew that coming in, this book's overview sections on the different types was a really good intro (“Nature or Nurture?” and “How do I find my type?” in Chapter 2, the type-by-type summaries in chapter 5.). But the real goal of this book is to give you the “next steps” past that initial discovery of your type. To that end, I found a few flashes of great things, but also a lot of impatience and disappointment.

I'd like to give full credit for leaning into the Enneagram from an explicitly Christian perspective. I thought he had a pretty good introduction to contemplative practices overall (“Why Contemplation?” and “The gifts of solitude, silence, and stillness” in chapter 7; intros to Centering prayer and the Examen in ch10). And the best part of the book included some really practical thoughts on how to think about your spiritual development based on some of the attributes of your type. His recommended “prayer postures” in particular stuck with me, and I thought he had an excellent Biblical passage discussing them, with Christ's temptation in the desert. (“Praying with our centers” in chapter 7 and especially the “From complexity to practical spirituality” in chapter 8). And he begins in chapter 9 to give a type-by-type discussion of spiritual practice. Or so I thought! After over 200 pages of prelude to what is presumably the purpose of the book judging by its subtitle, this crucial chapter is painfully short. At the end, I felt like I really only got a paragraph or two of spiritual advice in the whole book.

It felt like the final chapters (9 and 10) were the heart of where the book was going, and had good thoughts, but were less than 10% of the pages count (and well over half of them were for each of the other types, which I didn't read much of).

I think part of my problem might be my impatience with the material he spent the rest of the book on. For chapter after chapter, he would dive into the Triads and Affect types, etc. I felt like very little of those chapters resonated with me; I would read “1s are like this” and think “nope, I don't think I'm like that.” And since there's no argument to it, just explanation, I never felt persuaded by them. He treated them all as some revelation to humanity, but they mostly felt arbitrary to me. This was NOT helped by his sections on the history of the Enneagram. I happened to study Evagrius in a class in seminary, and it's definitely true that his eight evil thoughts (later revised as the 7 deadly sins) were prevalent throughout church history. But that's a far stretch from seeming to claim his heritage as vindication of the Enneagram as a source of ancient wisdom (and let alone Homer's “the Odyssey”). At its worst, this felt hokey and borderline pseudo-scientific, especially on some of the numerology.

I'll try to be openminded going forward and be aware of those traits within myself, but so far have not. I still like the Enneagram overall, and this book prompted some good conversations. It just didn't have nearly as much of “finding your unique path to spiritual growth” for me as I expected and hoped for. Maybe I'll see my triad attributes at some point and give the book an extra star.

[Insert joke about an Enneagram 1 critiquing an Enneagram book for being too touchy-feely and not having enough practical advice for what to do]