To know ourselves is to allow ourselves to be fully human, which enables us to draw close to God and offer grace to others. It is hard to admit to being what we are; many of us are far harder on ourselves than we would care to admit. For many in the Christian household, we have grown up with an assumption that Saint Peter is standing at the pearly gates, tabulating some sort of daily SAT exam to see if we measure up to the worthiness of heaven. This produces in us a sense of anxiety that we’re always missing the mark, and that to be accepted we must leave behind our humanity.
Tragically, this sense of shame in who we are is a result of the risk of our radical free will. Nothing else in creation can choose to be what it is not - animals, trees, rocks, stars, they all glorify God by being precisely what they were created to be. Yet in order for us to truly love God, we must have the option to not choose. This is a high risk on God’s part, but with a high reward - chosen, willful love. Part of the journey of humans is to hold together these two halves of who we are, that we are both image-bearers containing within us the DNA of the Creator, yet also capable of great evil. The question becomes, can we see ourselves honestly through the eyes of God and make the move to draw close for redemption of our personalities?
One worrying counteraction to a certain form of legalistic religion that is rather condemnatory of the human condition is to say there is in fact nothing wrong with us. That we are already perfect and not broken. That sort of thinking may be rather appealing and a balm to wounded hearts compounded by shame, but when we zoom out we realize it is as dishonest as the philosophy is rebels against that sees us as living garbage.
Several years ago I had the opportunity to lead a team to a sister church in Warsaw, Poland. Towards the end of the trip we took my students out to the Majdanek concentration camp near Lublin in the east of the country. It was a cold November day, and there were few other visitors about. One of the unique characteristics of Majdanek is that the Red Army moved in so swiftly that the Nazis had no time to destroy evidence of what they had been doing there, which was common practice elsewhere. The concentration camp has been eerily preserved, including a collection of over 400,000 pairs of shoes robbed from the interned that were to be shipped to Berlin and sold on the streets for profit. It is a terrifying place.
I was walking by myself between two rows of barracks along the main stretch. I began to tune to the sound of the gravel crackling under my hiking boots, and it dawned on me that I was walking where Nazis had trodden. I could imagine the faces of mostly young men going to and fro their business in this place, the extermination of Jews and Roma and other dissenters. I shuddered to imagine the great deceit these young men had fallen prey to, that would cause them to participate in such atrocity. Did they know what they were doing? Did they understand the consequences, or had they deceived themselves into believing this was for the best? The alien behavior of Nazism felt heavy in the still damp air.
It was at this moment I felt a whisper from the Spirit of God; “what was in the hearts of those young men is in you as well”. I suddenly realized that the very thing I felt made them other than me, as a better-educated, more rationale and compassionate human being, was something that in truth bound us together. The Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who was interned at a gulag in Siberia by those very same liberators of the Majdanek concentration camp years later for writing disparaging things about Stalin, wrote that, "the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either — but right through every human heart.” None of us are exempt. We are capable of great beauty, and we all have capacity for horrible evil. This is the paradox of being a human being.
I know few other places where the two halves of humanity are held together in tension like Christianity. It is a view of our nature that is devastatingly honest, yet profoundly hopeful. To see ourselves through the eyes of God is to see God’s fingerprint in our DNA while also honing in on our deficiencies that reveal patterns in which we hurt ourselves and others, and we pull away from or rebel against God. To allow ourselves the possibility of humanity also means we are more graceful to others; we allow them the fullness of their potential and the mercy of being on a journey like we are.
The awesome truth of your personality is that your greatest gift to the world and your greatest liability usually sit right next to each other. The questions becomes - what is guiding you?
Saint Paul draws upon this great exchange earlier in that same letter to the Galatians. I want to quote Eugene Peterson’s version because he hits home the two paths before us:
“What actually took place is this: I tried keeping rules and working my head off to please God, and it didn’t work. So I quit being a ‘law man’ so that I could be God’s man. Christ’s life showed me how, and enabled me to do it. I identified myself completely with him. Indeed, I have been crucified with Christ. My ego is no longer central. It is no longer important that I appear righteous before you or have your good opinion, and I am no longer driven to impress God. Christ lives in me. The life you see me living is not ‘mine,’ but it is lived by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. I am not going to go back on that.” (Gal. 2:19-21, MSG)
Perhaps you are more familiar with the phrasing in the NIV: “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me.” The Greek word Paul uses for “I” should ring familiar for us - ego. What he is claiming is that his egotistical fixations are no longer the guiding principles behind how he moves through the world, but the Spirit of Jesus living and active in him. Jesus, as the Truly Human One, becomes the model for us for what is means to be fully human. Just as God promised Noah that God would never destroy the earth again, God is promising you to not erase your personality, but to engage in the long-term meticulous work of redemption - giving new value to what is already there, as you begin to look more like Jesus.
In each of us, there is a tension between our ego fixation and the spirit of Jesus. Our fundamental desire is to claim, or perhaps reclaim, a love we perceive is ours. Yet when we lean too hard into our usual patterns of thinking, feeling, and doing, we become compulsive and hurt ourselves and others. We become burned out and cynical. We reject God. The sinister thing is that those blessings we have to offer the world in a generous spirit become our undoing. Our friends and family might even applaud our bad behavior because it works for them, and we find ourselves trapped accepting counterfeit forms of love.
It is revelations like these wherein I stop seeing something like the Enneagram as a neat party trick and more as a true path to freedom, to wholeness. The Enneagram in particular affords me nine ways of seeing how our gifts can become liabilities when we overindulge our ego’s compulsive pursuits of genuine love. What I would like to do, then, is talk through each of these nine paths in how they explore the tension between compulsion and grace. I would encourage you to listen carefully to each tension, resisting the temptation to rush to your specific type if you already know it, because all of these messages exist in all of us to some degree. Pay attention to which one pricks at something deep within you that makes you uncomfortable; the juxtaposition might feel insulting or embarrassing because it is an intentionally stark contrast. It is not because we have to choose between these things necessarily, because we are not to do away with our gifts. Rather it is to reveal that, in some way, we may already have chosen one path over another in a way that doesn’t actually serve us.
You can work really hard, or you can be in Christ. This is perhaps the message that would most resonate with Saint Paul, based on the passages we have glimpsed in his letter to the Galatians. Many of us in the Christian household feel that looming sword of Damocles hanging over us, waiting for us to make a wrong move. Sadly, we come to believe if we just try harder, make more of an impact, and not waste any time, we can be acceptable in the eyes of God. It’s all about potential, whether or not we are living up to it. Problematically this compulsion to behave and do good leads to a deep resentment that we cannot carry. We mercilessly flog ourselves for missing the mark, and we try to drag others down for their failures through prescriptive judgement.
To be in Christ is to accept grace; that we are “good enough”. Those two words together can be a terror for hard workers, self-perfecters, or they can be the gateway to serenity. From the place of grace we can continue to make the world a better place because we are grounded in the goodness of God.
You can be useful and nice, or you can be in Christ. Those of us who find ourselves stuck here are perhaps most applauded by others for our outer appearance. Why wouldn’t we want to be helpful? Aren’t we supposed to be nice, because God is nice? The trap is that we begin to believe our value is in our relational function to others, and not in who we inherently are. In fact, we find ourselves engulfed in a special form of pride, one in which we compulsively jump to help others so that we don’t have to admit to our own neediness. This breeds contempt in us towards those we are trying to help.
To be in Christ means that we are desired for who we are, not what we can offer. It gives us a freedom to be our full selves before the throne of God, deficiencies and all, and still know we are cherished. When we receive true, holy humility before Jesus, we learn discernment to know what we are being invited to do out of our belovedness and not as a way to maintain it.
You can be impressive and admired, or you can be in Christ. In our modern culture, image is everything. Because we mostly only glimpse the surface appearance of other people, we are tempted to maintain an outward visage of success, resourcefulness, maturity, even depth. When we confuse admiration with true love, we deceive other people with manicured hype. We conform ourselves to others’ expectations and definitions of a winning personality, flitting between versions of ourselves until we become lost in the mix. Most tragically of all, we deceive ourselves into thinking this outer garment is our true self.
To be in Christ means to know our value to God sinks beneath the paper-thin presentation of a person who has it all together. It can be difficult to let go of the myriad masks we have collected over the years, but once we stop trying to impress God and the people we care about we discover the permission to be our authentic, messy selves. We come home to who we really are, without all the bells and whistles.
You can be unique and independent, or you can be in Christ. It is tempting to believe that what sets us apart makes us known. While many seek conformity to the crowd, some of us hold tightly to what makes us unique. In fact, we may reject public consensus, even rebel against it, to head in the opposite direction, believing if we cannot fit in we may as well stand out. Tragically, this means our deep desire for belonging is put in direct opposition to our desire for independence. We find ourselves on an emotional pendulum swinging between these two extremes, never at rest.
To be in Christ means that we receive the desire that sits behind the desire to be unique: we are seen. We are special because of how God gazes upon us with a singular fondness. The envy and jealousy we struggle with when we measure ourselves to what others have melts away, and we learn an emotional equanimity, a tranquility that helps us transcend the need to fir in or stand apart.
You can try to figure it all out, or you can be in Christ. Knowledge can be power, but it has its limits. The world can feel scary and chaotic and overwhelming, and we can so easily believe if we can understand it all we can stave of fear of the unknown. This is an impossible task however. There is no amount of knowledge than can hold the chaos at bay. In fact, it can shrink our world and rob us of awe and wonder. To believe we can conquer creation through understanding means our gifts of curiosity begin to work against us. We retreat from the world, grasping miserly at what little we feel we do have, hoping the storm will pass. It won’t.
To be in Christ is to let go of concrete knowledge for something greater: mystery. In mystery we give ourselves over to something greater than ourselves. It envelops and saturates us, holds us without us being able to contain it. When we embrace mystery, our miserliness is converted into a holy objectivity and we find ourselves more generous than we could imagine.
You can be safe and sure, or you can be in Christ. There is simply no denying the world is a dangerous place, no matter what we do. We cannot prepare for every contingency, we cannot plan enough or shore up our defenses to protect ourselves. Indeed, to compulsively seek security-as-clarity only makes things worse. We become chronically anxious and timid, afraid of every unknown. We become distrustful of God, we become distrustful of others, and we distrust ourselves.
To be in Christ is to accept the paradox that, while the world is not a safe place, you will be cared for. “In this life you will have many troubles," Jesus whispers to you, “but take heart: I have overcome the world." The faithfulness of Christ to you will encourage faith in yourself, and you will find the confidence you need to face your fears and move from survival mode into an abundant life.
You can be happy, or you can be in Christ. It is a wonderful thing to find ourselves happy because of moments, people, experiences. However, happiness is not a pursuit in and of itself, it should be the product of a grounded life. When we single-mindedly pursue happiness, we begin to measure the quality of our lives by what we feel in the moment. Ironically, people who purse happiness as a goal tend to be the least happy, because their desire is to escape the difficult or mundane moments that make up a significant part of life. Escapism leads us to compulsively chase after experiences, gobbling up what we can to stave off the darkness in a sort of counterfeit “glory to glory.”
To be in Christ is to welcome an integrated life, where all moments and feelings belong. We become grounded in a certain kind of joy of being found in Jesus that is not contingent on the current circumstance. In this place, we find a sobriety that carries us farther than we thought possible. And happiness becomes a gift we receive with open hands.
You can be strong and in control, or you can be in Christ. The world is divided into those who have power and those who don’t. Some of us at an early age, in order to protect ourselves and advocate for the less fortunate, made an inner pact to never be weak, never be vulnerable; to try and gain power so we can fix the world. However, the pursuit of power and strength often leads us into a form of self-reliance that makes us distrustful. We feel the pressure to be the answer we seek. When we slip into a compulsive drive to make and break the world by our own standards, we can often become the thing we fear: a bully who steamrolls others without thinking. It is also an exhausting posture to maintain.
To be in Christ is to learn how to relinquish power to the One who is worthy, who alone can protect us and set the world to rights. We can open up our fists and begin to trust God to safeguard our inner tenderness. We can reclaim the innocence of childhood, trusting God and others to care for those in need, ourselves included.
You can be unaffected by life, or you can be in Christ. The world can feel like it is simply too much. There are endless lists of responsibilities, unaccounted for crises, problems to solve, inner turmoil to tamp down. It is tempting to confuse peace with comfort, and retreat from anything that can affect us negatively. In this space we pull back, take fewer risks, busy ourselves with activities that mean nothing in the grand scheme of things. Prioritizing comfort, however, produces in us a numbness to life over time. We sleepily wander from day to day, and before long we realize we have fallen asleep to half our life.
To be in Christ is to find real peace that comes through risking engagement and being affected by the highs and lows. It is a peace that comes through prioritizing life, taking risks to pursue meaning, processing hard things. In Christ we move from sloth to holy action, we become alive to life itself.
To be in Christ is to be in love. It is to receive grace that reminds us of who we truly are. From that unshakeable, eternal place our energies and contributions to the world flow as a product of love. In grace, we find what the deepest part of us desires from love: acceptance, security, empowerment. We must capture a vision of the destination Jesus beckons us to, and the specific obstacles in our way that are a result of our ego, if we want to steward well the gifts God has given us.
EXERCISE:
Which of these nine statements resonates most with you? How have you seen that pattern of ego fixation take hold of your time and energy?
Make two lists, one that begins “When I indulge my ego” and “when I embody the spirit of Jesus”. Prayerfully consider each of the following, trying to respond as honestly as possible:
What vices and virtues present themselves in me?
What leads me to burnout and cynicism? What enables me to learn wisdom and discernment?
How do I hurt others out of my ego?
How do I hurt myself?
What makes me pull away from God, and what draws me close to God?