1 When Cron’s professional life was on the brink, having discovered that he was the wrong sort of person for the job he was currently doing, he needed some way of making sense of it all. May you learn to see your self with the same delight, pride, and expectation with which God sees you in every moment,” writes Ian Cron in the opening chapter of The Road Back to You, re-counting the prayer his counselor and mentor prayed over him as he began his own Enneagram journey of healing and self-knowledge. “May you realize that the shape of your soul is unique, that you have a special destiny here, that behind the façade of your life there is something beautiful and eternal happening. The New Age Roots and the misuses of Scripture - particularly in regards to the theological definition of sin - should give those seeking personal transformation through use of the Enneagram pause. Claiming it arose in the ancient Christian past, Richard Rohr, Ian Cron, and others have, perhaps unwittingly, adopted a gnostic view of the person, one which requires special self-knowledge. Oscar Ichazo and New Age spiritualist Claudio Naranjo joined it to modern-day psychological practice and from there, through Richard Rohr, who borrows from Jungian conceptions of spirituality, it made its way into the Catholic church.Īs the Enneagram sweeps through mainstream Evangelicalism, Christians might be curious about both its origins and its view of the human person. In fact, the Enneagram was first invoked in the 1800s by George Gurdjieff and, after him, by Rodney Collin who used it as an astrological device for explaining character and personality. The origins of the Enneagram are believed by some to be ancient, invented by the Desert Father, Evagrius, along with the seven deadly sins. Ian Cron and Suzanne Stabile provide descriptions of each number in terms of health and unhealth, whereas Richard Rohr occasionally uses the word “redeemed” for a person living into his or her optimal self. Each number is associated with a particular sin and takes on the characteristics of the numbers on either side, the wings. The nine numbers are grouped by three - those of the head, those of the heart, and those of the gut. The Enneagram, a personality system configured around a circle of nine types, promises to help the spiritual seeker break free from sin, peel back layers of dysfunctional ways of thinking, and find inside him or herself the essential, God-given gem.

Ian cron the road back to you