“By the word of the Lord the heavens were made” (Psalm 33:6). This tells us that the world came about as the result of a decision, not from chaos or chance, and this exalts it all the more. The creating word expresses a free choice. The universe did not emerge as the result of arbitrary omnipotence, a show of force or a desire for self-assertion. Creation is of the order of love. God’s love is the fundamental moving force in all created things: “For you love all things that exist, and detest none of the things that you have made; for you would not have made anything if you had hated it” (Wisdom 11:24). —Pope Francis [1]
Acknowledging the intrinsic value and beauty of creation, elements, plants, and animals is a major paradigm shift for most Western Christians. In fact, many in the past often dismissed such thinking as animism or paganism. We limited God’s love and salvation to our own human species and, then, in this theology of scarcity, we did not have enough love left to cover all of humanity! To be honest, God ended up looking quite stingy and inept. Hardly “victorious,” as our Easter hymns claim.
The word profane comes from the Latin words pro, meaning “in front of,” and fanum, meaning “temple.” We thought we lived “outside the temple.” Without a nature-based spirituality, it was a profane universe, bereft of Spirit, so we had to keep building shrines and churches to capture and hold our now domesticated and tamed God. Soon we did not know where to look for the divine, as we made God’s presence so limited. We became like fish looking for water, and often arguing about who owned the water!
Note that I’m not saying God is all things (pantheism), but that each living thing reveals some aspect of God. God is both greater than the whole of our universe, and as Creator inter-penetrates all created things (panentheism). No exceptions.
When you can enjoy this, “the world becomes a communion of subjects more than a collection of objects” as the “geologian” Fr. Thomas Berry (1914-2009) said so wisely. [2]
When you love something, you grant it soul, you see its soul, and you let its soul touch yours. You must love something deeply to know its soul. Before the resonance of love, you are largely blind to the meaning, value, and power of ordinary things to “save” you—to help you live in union with the source of all being. In fact, until you can appreciate and even delight in the soul of other things, even trees and animals, I doubt if you have discovered your own soul either. Soul knows soul.
Adapted from Richard Rohr, A New Cosmology: Nature as the First Bible, disc 2 (Center for Action and Contemplation: 2009), CD, MP3 download; and “Is ‘Green’ a Christian Position?” Radical Grace, vol. 22, no. 1 (Center for Action and Contemplation: 2009), 3, 22.
4. Prayer
Lord, grant us the wisdom to care for the earth and till it. Help us to act now for the good of future generations and all your creatures. Help us to become instruments of a new creation, Founded on the covenant of your love.
Easter is not just the final chapter of Jesus’ life, but the final chapter of history. Death does not have the last word. (Sunday)
Love is the energy that sustains the universe, moving us toward a future of resurrection. We do not even need to call it love or God or resurrection for its work to be done. (Monday)
Great love and great suffering bring us back to God, and I believe this is how Jesus himself walked humanity back to God. It is not just a path of resurrection rewards but a path that includes death and woundedness. (Tuesday)
If matter is inhabited by God, then matter is somehow eternal, and when the creed says, we believe in the “resurrection of the body,” it means our bodies too, not just Jesus’ body! As in him, so also in all of us. (Wednesday)
In the resurrection, the single physical body of Jesus moved beyond all limits of space and time into a new notion of physicality and light—which includes all of us in its embodiment. (Thursday)
Death and life are two sides of the same coin; you cannot have one without the other. Each time you surrender, each time you trust the dying, your faith is led to a deeper level and you discover a Larger Self underneath. (Friday)
Practice: Alive Again (A Song Today!)
This Easter week we’ve explored Jesus’ resurrection as an archetype of the universal pattern all life follows. In the midst of suffering, grief, or depression, it can be hard to remember that this, too, shall pass. While we can’t skip over or rush through pain to get to a happy ending, sometimes it helps to focus on resurrection. Can you recall a time when you came out the other side of a hard experience, a day when you suddenly felt free? Can you imagine joy and healing and actually feel it in your body?
From this space of hope and possibility, read aloud and listen to a choir sing this poem by e. e. cummings. Try whispering and shouting the words. Listen in stillness or while dancing. What is it like to be “alive again today”?
Draw us forth, God of all creation. Draw us forward and away from limited certainty into the immense world of your love. Give us the capacity to even for a moment taste the richness of the feast you give us. Give us the peace to live with uncertainty, with questions, with doubts. Help us to experience the resurrection anew with open wonder and an increasing ability to see you in the people of Easter. Amen.
True love of self entails a profound acceptance of ourselves—returning to Presence and settling into ourselves as we actually are without attempting to change our experience. —Don Richard, Richard Riso and Russ Hudson [1]
I believe the purpose of mature religion or spirituality is to cultivate in us the ability to accept “the sacrament of the present moment” just as it is, including the good and the bad, and to find God in it. Our human minds are prone to dividing the field of the moment and to focusing on the parts rather than the whole, thus missing what the eyes of the Spirit see. The Enneagram’s root sins or passions can be seen as nine different ways of “missing the mark” (hamartia), nine ways of being disconnected from God’s Presence—our essence—here and now. By viewing our Enneagram compulsions as reminders to return to presence, we can become aware of the Divine Presence in us and around us and we can share that love with a hurting world.
In the Enneagram tradition, “sin” is simply that which doesn’t work, i.e. self-defeating behavior. Our root capital sins can be understood as emergency solutions that we developed in early childhood as a way of coping with our environment. At the time, these coping mechanisms were necessary for survival. But the older we grow, the more they get in the way of living freely as our True Self. The nine Enneagram types correlate with the seven “deadly sins” (pride, envy, anger, sloth, avarice, lack of moderation or “gluttony,” and lust) and two additional temptations, deceit and fear. These last two are perhaps the most pervasive sins, because power builds on them and uses them, and thus they are often the most hidden, as we see in the present election cycle in the United States.
The Enneagram refuses to eliminate the negative and is grounded in what Bill Wilson called “a vital spiritual experience.” We only have the courage to face our deep illusions when we are entirely loved and accepted by God or by somebody who acts as God toward us. So, with great irony, our faults are the crack that lets grace in, exactly as the Gospel teaches. We must bring our root sin to consciousness rather than deny or repress it. We can only heal our wound with kindness and compassion, not judgment and condemnation. This is how Jesus treated sinners, such as the woman caught in adultery (see John 8:1-11).
Teresa of Ávila said that the sinner is actually one who does not love himself or herself enough. We do not see or admire the whole self; so we split and try to love the good self and reject the bad self. But Jesus told us to let the weeds and the wheat grow together until the harvest, lest we destroy the wheat by trying to pull up the weeds (see Matthew 13:24-30). The Enneagram allows us to see and embrace our shadow, the part of us that most carries our shame. Only with some degree of non-dual consciousness can we hold imperfection and beauty together in what Merton called “a hidden wholeness.”
It is no surprise to me that the Enneagram is unpopular with many. It refuses to disguise the pain, the difficult work, or the cost of enlightenment. By exposing our own darkness, it soon compels us to address that same darkness in culture, oppression, injustice, and human degradation. Sin “brings forth death” (see James 1:15), or in other words, sin is its own punishment. Our lack of moderation kills animals and forests; our aggressiveness and fear has led to gigantic arsenals. The poor pay for the envy and greed of the industrialized nations with their death.
We all have a little of each personality type in us, allowing us greater understanding and compassion for others. But for our own transformation, we must recognize that we tend to have a primary set of blinders, a primary delusion, a capital sin. There is a key dilemma, a habitual trap in each of us. We must notice how we block ourselves by our preferred style of perception. Even though this way of perceiving reality doesn’t reflect the True Self, it seems to “work” for us, giving us false energy and purpose.
This one pitfall is so prevalent in our life that we don’t recognize it, except perhaps through a surprising “aha” experience. In an instant, our lifelong false motivations and reactions become crystal clear. That’s usually both a very humiliating and wonderful experience. It’s sobering to realize that even the best things we’ve done were done for self-serving reasons. But it’s liberating to know that God knew this all along, loves us anyway, and actually used our sins for God’s purposes. As Paul puts it, “Precisely where sin abounds, grace abounds even more” (see Romans 5:20).
Our deepest sin and our greatest gift are two sides of the same coin. We spend the first part of our life creating our self-image and our ego by building on what we do well. That’s a necessary stage. By our twenties, our personality type is well-established because it works for us in some strange way. But in the middle of our life we may begin to see the other side of the coin, the dark side of our gift. When we are excessively fixated on our supposed gift it becomes a sin. Maintaining this self-image, this false self, becomes more important than anything else. This is where the Enneagram can help us to recognize this game for what it is and to disarm ourselves—to abandon the defense of the false self that we have created. We are letting go of what only seems good and discovering what in us is really good. We are returning to the Divine Presence in and around us. This leaving the garden and returning to the garden happens many, many times in a healthy life. And each time is both a self-revelation and a divine-revelation.
References:
[1] Don Richard Riso and Russ Hudson, The Wisdom of the Enneagram (Bantam Books: 1999), 347.
Adapted from Richard Rohr, The Enneagram: The Discernment of Spirits (CAC: 2004), disc 1 (CD, DVD, MP3 download);
Richard Rohr and Andreas Ebert, The Enneagram: A Christian Perspective (The Crossroad Publishing Company: 2001), xvii, xxi, 25-26, 29, 31-32, 34, 85; and
Richard Rohr, The Enneagram as a Tool for Your Spiritual Journey (CAC: 2009), disc 4 (CD, DVD, MP3 download).
Is the Enneagram new to you? Are you wondering, what is the Enneagram? How can the Enneagram help me? Which number on the Enneagram am I? Does the Enneagram work? This is just one post in a two-week series about the Enneagram. Click here for an introduction to the Enneagram and links to additional reflections and resources on the topic.
Today, creator of the universe, I ask you to help me to accept my self just the way I am, without judgement. Let me accept my thoughts just the way they are, with all the emotions, desires, dreams, and my unique way of being. Help me to accept my body just the way it with all the imperfection without any judgement. Let the love I have for myself be so strong that I never again reject myself. I never sabotage my happiness, freedom, and love.
Let the power of my self-love be so strong enough to break all the lies that tell me I am not strong enough, I am not good enough, I am not worthy and I can not make it. Let the power of my self-love be so strong that I no longer need to live my life according to other people’s opinion. Let me trust my instincts completely to make the choices I must make. Help me, creator, to increase my self-love until my entire being is transformed from fear to love and joy.
Starting today, help me to love myself so much that I never set any circumstances that go against me. I can live my life just being myself and not pretending to be someone else just to be accepted by other people. With the power of self-love, let me enjoy what I see every time when I look in the mirror. Help me to feel such intense self-love that I always enjoy my own presence.
Let my self-love be the power that changes the dream of my life. With the new power in my heart, the power of self-love, let me transform every relationship I have, beginning with the relationship I have with myself. Help me to be free of any conflict with others. Help me to love myself so much that I forgive anyone who has ever hurt me in my life. Strengthen my will to forgive my self at this moment.
Give me the courage to love my family and friends unconditionally. Help me to create the kind of love in my relationship so there is no winner or looser. Together let us work as a team for joy, for love and for harmony. Let the relationship with my friends and family be based on respect and joy so I no longer have the need to tell them how to think, or how to be. Help me to accept others just the way they are, without judgement, because when I reject them, I reject myself. When I reject myself, I reject you.
Today is the new beginning. Help me to start my life over beginning today with the power of self-love. Help me, creator, to enjoy my life, to enjoy my relationships, to explore life, to take the risks, to be alive, and to no longer live in fear of love. Let me open my heart to love that is my birthright. Help me to become the master of Gratitude, Generosity, and Love so that I can enjoy all of your creations forever and ever.
