The Enneagram Doesn’t Put You in a Box – It Shatters Boxes

I heard a great message  recently by Pastor Danny Silk on how we categorize things. The message is titled “The Gift of Discernment,” which initially seems inaccurate but ends up being brilliant.

That’s because we usually think of the gift of discernment in terms of being able to tell whether something is true or false, or, more specifically, whether a person or spirit is of God or the other guy. But that’s not what Danny’s talking about.

He uses a great analogy about how our brains work: the gameshow “Jeopardy.” In this game, the world is divided into a seemingly endless series of categories, each with its own set of boxes. Each box has a value. Simple enough.

Well, here’s the kicker. The enemy of our souls is often called the Adversary in the New Testament. Adversary, in Greek, is categoros, where we get the word category from. We humans put people in categories, then into boxes, and we ascribe value to those boxes. And then, Danny says, we withhold love from those who aren’t in our box.

This is the tragedy of personality. It reduces our worldview into only one way of seeing the world. It puts us in one box and others in boxes that have no value for us.

I once was describing the Enneagram to a friend, and he said, “I don’t like personality systems. I don’t want to be put in a box.”

My reply? “The Enneagram shows you the box you’re already in – and how to get out of it.”

That’s the deep beauty of this model of human behavior that goes way beyond a personality system. It not only shows you your box, your patterns of behavior that you are fixated on, but how to notice those patterns so that they begin to loosen their grip on you.

It also shows you the boxes other people are stuck in. You can see that, just like you have patterns of belief and behavior that you follow, so do they. They can’t help it any more than you can – at least, before they know how to become aware and present.

You learn to have compassion for yourself – and for them. With practice, over time, you watch the walls of your box get flimsier. You find that you can step out of your box and not die. You can even release others from the boxes you have put them in. You take the ascribed value off those boxes and just let people be who they are.

Danny wraps up his message by quoting Jesus’s words from Luke 9:56, “You do not know what kind of spirit you are of.” Danny title his message “The Gift of Discernment” because we need to quite trying to figure out what boxes to put people in and discern what spirit WE are of!

If you follow Jesus, you are of Jesus’s spirit. In the rest of verse 56, Jesus explains that he came to save people, not burn them up like two of his disciples were proposing. Jesus’s spirit, his desire, is that we become one. The Adversary wants us to divide each other with categories.

The Enneagram helps us stop making these false divisions and stop going along with the Adversary’s plan of disunity. It helps us discern who we really are underneath all that personality stuff and see what spirit we really are of.

That’s a whole lot of box-shattering goodness, if you ask me.

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