From the article "The Self-Help Movement That Is Upending American Christianity," a discussion of the perfidious Enneagram craze. The first section of this case study was enough to give me an extended pause. Someone the woman in the below snippet to pat herself on the back and she was so taken with the idea that she dropped the Church at the curb. How does someone's third eye get opened at the revelation that they can be self-congratulatory? How is such a string of ideas not something that would cause someone to cringe in embarrassment saying this publicly? I'm bemused.
Sarajane Case remembers the precise moment she severed her lifelong relationship with Christianity. Her uneasiness had been building over time, sparked by the realization that her queer friends were not at home in the church she loved. But the end came suddenly and quietly: In 2010, at the end of a yoga class, the instructor told Case and the other attendees to thank themselves for showing up.Complete article here.
“That just broke something in me,” she says.
What Case realized in that moment was that she had never truly thanked herself for anything. “Everything I had ever done in my life I was like, ‘All credit to God, everything good is God, I am terrible, anything good in me is God.’”
Case had grown up going to church every Sunday, had attended a Southern Baptist university, and had effectively built her identity around her devoutness. That day in 2010, she realized that religion made her feel she had to downplay her own identity as a form of religious devotion. So she stopped...
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"...Case had grown up going to church every Sunday, had attended a Southern Baptist university, and had effectively built her identity around her devoutness. That day in 2010, she realized that religion made her feel she had to downplay her own identity as a form of religious devotion..."
ReplyDeleteAt the heart of Protestant mind is a Cartesian "self", in the sentence above "identity" is the key word. This identity is in binary relationship true (i.e. God) based on will/thought (i.e. devotion), but it *essentially* is self dependant (i.e. cartesian).
She is simply following and living the consequences of this anthropology (it's not "theology" in a classical Orthodox sense). In a deep and profound sense, she is not throwing this 'church' to the curb, as so much finding its true inner core and life and leaving the tension of unsustainable "God and I" identity behind...
Very interesting article:
ReplyDeleteI see this as a side effect of over-emphasizing Grace without Works. Logical conclusion is to deny any goodness within a person. Let alone that someone could maybe work on their passions, learn to accept their brokenness as Gods way of working in them and uncover who they were meant to be through spiritual direction and confession. (Kind of goes against Once Saved and Sola Scriptura)
Enneagrams are funny secular based reaction to this. Funny how foreign this seems if your Orthodox.
I hadn't heard about the weird Enneagram/Christian intersection. But I've had friends who take the Myers-Briggs seriously, so you never know.
ReplyDeleteIt's worse than you know. It was created by an apostate Orthodox Christian seminarian in the 20th century named George Ilych Gurdjieff. It's occult and really destructive. Weirdly, the Enneagram people have a website with apologia supposedly refuting this, but seriously. Weird. Occult. Demonic. Nonsense.
Deletehttps://www.catholicculture.org/culture/library/view.cfm?recnum=2622
Enneagram has been around for a long time...just another new age gnostic tool of the devil.
ReplyDelete