Iron Man and the Quandary of Self-Love

"You're tiptoeing, big man. You need to strut."

Tony Stark (Iron Man) to Bruce Banner (Hulk)


Rewatching The Avengers the other day, this snippet of a conversation caught my eye.  When I first encountered Tony Stark and the Iron Man movies, I wasn't a terribly huge fan of Stark's "text-book narcissism" as Black Widow put it in her report to Nick Fury.  But he's starting to grow on me.  One of the reasons he's starting to grow on me is because his very narcissism presents a challenge and a question to the audience: what exactly is the difference between narcissism and proper self-love?  And given a good definition, how do we actually go about recognizing that difference in the field, per se?   

One of the challenges of Tony Stark's case is that he is an exceptionally skilled individual who believes that he is an exceptionally skilled individual.  That's not the problem, and it certainly isn't the part that makes him vulnerable to the charge of narcissism.  In recognizing his own genius and achievement, he's just being honest.  Being honest--at least in good moral psychology, Christian and pagan--is one of the things that leads you to self-knowledge.  In acknowledging that, Stark is just being a realist.

The real reason people say Stark is a narcissist is because he is a) thoroughly devoted to self-pleasure and feeding his own interests without proper courtesy and attention to others and b) because "the rules don't apply to him."  But that isn't the thing I'm most interested in.  The thing I am interested in is the way in which Stark's advice to Banner was actually hitting on something good.  The following conversation gets at the heart of things a bit more.  When Tony Stark suggests that Banner will be "suiting up" with the rest of the Avengers, Banner replies:

"Ah, see. I don't get a suit of armor. I'm exposed, like a nerve. It's a nightmare."

"You know, I've got a cluster of shrapnel, trying every second to crawl its way into my heart.  This stops it. This little circle of light. It's part of me now, not just armor. It's a terrible privilege."

Banner responds: "But you can control it."

"Because I learned how."

"It's different."

Stark says, "Hey, I've read all about your accident. That much gamma exposure should have killed you."

Banner replies: "So you're saying that the Hulk, the other guy, saved my life? That's nice. It's a nice sentiment. Saved it for what?"

Stark: "I guess we'll find out."

With a wry smile from the resident Hulk, "You may not enjoy that."

Tony Stark: "You just might."

It may be true that Stark's enjoyment of the Hulk's destructive tendencies isn't terribly wise or constructive.  But the movie goes on to prove his perspective to be the right one.  Whatever burden the Hulk side of Banner might be, he's also a terribly effective asset equal to the task of taking on Loki single-handedly and dealing some serious damage to the Leviathans.  

What struck me, however, was more the enjoyment side of Stark's remarks.  Stark's not just egging Banner on to higher heights of self-esteem--he wants Banner to let go and enjoy himself.  He wants him to enjoy the destructive power of the Hulk, and see the power and hope for a more constructive use of the Hulk, even if it seems unlikely that the Hulk be fully trained to saddle.

Aside from the exaggerations of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, there's some very good advice there.  We spend a lot of time not enjoying ourselves.  We spend a lot of time berating, criticizing, and finding fault with ourselves.  We spend a lot of time in self-hatred and we don't spend a lot of time in appreciation and delight and even in glorying in ourselves.  But proper self-love is difficult to think about well.  How do I love and really celebrate and enjoy and even glory in the part of me that is good and wonderful and fearfully made by God without being a narcissist?  How do I love myself because God has loved me and wonderfully made me and destined me for glory rather than loving myself simply out of a false sense of ownership?  How do I balance the call for self-denial and proper abandonment of one's self and the call to the celebrate one's own goodness?

We are all faced with the quandary of reconciling loves--love for self, love for God, love for other created things, and we only succeed in reconciling loves when we know, understand and have been converted to the true purposes for which we love.  When I love myself and God for my own sake, I may not do wrong, but I haven't done much good either.  Self love, when it is the beginning of loves, is not a bad beginning.  It, however, is a terrible end for love--love of self and God for one's own sake must mature into something else or it will turn into narcissism.  (Narcissism is real life is much less attractive than narcissism enacted by Robert Downey, Jr.)  

When the world becomes contracted such that I--myself--am the only reason and purpose for which I love, my world becomes a false and ugly alternate reality.  Self-love is meant to be a natural tutor and example which shows us how it is we might love others.  The instinct for self-love does not have to be taught, though the maturation of it does, and self-love matures as the love of self is submitted to the love of God and the love of others.  It requires having our ideas about love submitted, transformed, and joined to the will, wisdom, and love of God.  And it requires a lot of obedience and renunciation and suffering--in many ways, we seem to lose much of ourselves before we find ourselves again, secure in God.

But during and after all of this transformation, when our loves change and are matured into ripeness--when we begin to see ourselves in God's light, purpose, and love, a wonderful thing happens.  We are freed, as Teresa of Avila told us so many years ago, to love ourselves for God's sake.  Having learned already to love God for his own sake, having seen God at the center of the cosmos and not ourselves, we begin to see ourselves again.  We perhaps catch a glimpse of ourselves out of the corner of our eyes and find that we are wonderfully and beautifully made.  And we begin to find out why God was so interested in the first place--we see what he sees, we find beautiful what he finds beautiful, and we find those things in ourselves.

As Bernard Lonergan and Henri de Lubac taught me, the first and most precious gift that God gives to us is ourselves.  We are meant to accept our lives as occassions for joy and goodness and to understand that there is more to the Creation than what is broken and damaged and harmful.  For some of us skeptics, joy and delight and acceptance of what is good in ourselves is most difficult because we think the most honest or the most rigorous or the most intellectual thing to do is to identify what is wrong rather than what is right.  But no matter what darkness exists in the human soul, it cannot overcome the brightness of creation, for the beauty of Creation is upheld by the hand of God, redeemed in the Resurrection of the Son, and preserved and guarded until the end by the work of the Spirit.

But we are called to a holy joy in ourselves.  We are called to take the same joy in ourselves that God does.  It isn't the only joy we have, and it isn't the most important joy we have.  But it is the very first gift God gives us and we are meant to come full circle in loving ourselves for his sake.

Dreamform Two: Gold Leaf Scrolls and Red Writing

(Note:  These dreams are in no particular chronological order.  I had this dream sometime in January, 2013.)

In my dream, I found myself ushered through rooms lit by torches clustered at the intersections of rounded arches.  The torchlight was warm and bright, and had the effect of coloring the walls reddish-gold.   The upper sections of the walls may have been plaster or stone, though the lower sections were definitely of a more textured and less reflective material, stone or wood.  The almost oval archways connecting various rooms were neither very high nor very wide, though I did not feel that the spaces were crabbed together in anyway.  Some of the archways slunk away into darkness, but I found myself in long, rectangular rooms filled with tables, light, and with robed men hard at work.  I had the impression of being underground, being very secure, and being in a place not my own.  The setting was familiar to me, yet I have never been in any place like it.  It was simple and beautiful, and reminds me most of Neogothic Anglican-style cathedrals and churches (say built in the late 19th, early 20th century).
   I did not stop to talk with anyone, and although I felt led to a very particular place in the bowels of this place, I did not see who was leading me.  After ducking through a few different rooms, and winding around tables and people, I found myself in another workroom, with a large, well-lit table in the center of the room.
    At some point, someone handed me a set of very large, honest-to-goodness scrolls.  The only time I have seen actual scrolls in waking life (in person, anyway) was ceremonial Torah scrolls in a Conservative Jewish synagogue on one of the High Holy Days.  Those were lavishly decorated.
    These were too.  First of all, they were enormous--probably they were two-and-a-half feet tall, and there were two sets of them.  The rollers were made of gold, or a material that looked like gold, and were stylized, though not elaborately so.  I unfurled--or someone else did--both sets of scrolls and laid them down the whole length of the table--maybe 10 feet or so?  I don't know: waking or sleeping I am a terrible measurer of distance or length or quanitity of any kind, really.  In any case, I am fairly certain I could have easily laid down on the table and not come to the end of it--and I'm about 5 and a half feet tall.  When both scrolls were unrolled the full length of the table, I am not sure that they were opened all the way.  Now that I think of it, I think they were not, but what I could see was this.
   The paper itself was covered over entirely in gold.  Rich, sparkling, deep gold.  And written on the gold, in the reddest, most perfect letters you can imagine, in a language entirely unfamiliar to me, in an alphabet entirely unfamiliar to me.  The letters were whole and perfect--perhaps a little raised from the text, either done by a typeset or the best calligrapher in the world.  The language looked a little like the Cree language, which I have only seen once while visiting The Forks in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and I had absolutely no hope of ever reading it.  Yet, I knew absolutely that the scrolls were mine.  The person who was showing them to me was showing them to me precisely because they were mine, and indeed, the Someone showing them to me, was really showing them to me becuase the scrolls were me.   And at some point after that, I woke up.
   As a student theologian, I am well aware that human beings are made in the image of God.  (Hey, that's what I wrote my graduate thesis on!)  And as made in the imagine of God, human beings are the parodox of parodoxes: we are finite pictures of the Infinite One.  As such, human being really are a living mystery.  You think particle physics is hard to fathom?  The human person more.  You contemplate the workings of a cell and think it profound?  The human person more.  And not the human person reduced to biology or chemistry or math or physics.  No, the human person who is biological, chemical, physical, and also much more than that--God-breathed, God-touched, God-crafted, and God-imaging.  Calvin said that the universe was the "mirror of God's work" (and I'm totally going to steal that for a book title someday), but the human person more.  No matter how deep how wide how unfathomable any part or even the whole of Creation is, in some mysterious sense, the human person--your neighbor, your enemy, your friend, your loved one--more, because while God has touched all of his creation and left traces of his presence there, he has left something more with human beings, His Very Image.
   But that's all well and good and not even all that difficult to say.  What is much more difficult is figuring out what that really means in the sometimes not so bright light of every-day life.  C. S. Lewis brings this to life brilliantly in the "Weight of Glory" when he talks of the hidden and potential glory alive in every human being.  He was inviting us to regard our neighbor as a holy and dreadfully important subject, worthy of considering, love, and something close to reverence . . . because the destiny which God has in mind for us is so great.       This dream was more about the noetic side of the equation, whereas Lewis' sermon was more about the ontic.  "Noetic" is philosopher-speak for "pertaining to knowledge or knowing."  So when I say the dream was noetic or epistemological, I mean that God was trying to show me something about how I am to know myself in light of the mystery of the human being made in the image of God.
     The thing he was communicating was this:  "You [and potentially anyone and everyone human] are priceless and beautiful.  Your soul is priceless and beautiful.  You can't even see your soul--meaning the invisible aspect of human life--all the time, but it really is there and it really is beautiful.  And you have no idea what's in there.  You have no idea what you are or who you are because what you are and you who are is absolutely too wonderful, too deep, too fantastically complicated for you to know.  You aren't going to know everything there is to know about yourself precisely because you are made in My image.  It is too much for you.  It is beyond you.  You don't speak the language, and you certainly can't read it.  But I know.  And I will tell you.  I will tell you what the writing says--what I have written--and I will tell you over time and I will tell you what you need to know.  But don't worry about it too much, because the thing is in my hand and there's nothing you can do about it apart from what I am doing and what I am saying to you.  So don't worry.  I will be there and I will speak."
      This was all very comforting to me.  Partly, it was comforting to me because I am indebted to the Spanish Mystics for a lot of their teaching on the spiritual life, and Christian discipline and virtue, and they, especially Teresa of Avila, have much to say about self-knowledge as a virtue.  One of my undergraduate professors said that only Christianity made self-knowledge a virtue.  I haven't researched that much myself, but it would be interesting to see the ways in which that is true.  In any case, Christianity certainly takes self-knowledge very seriously--you see it especially in Augustine and Calvin.  For you Reformed peeps out there, perhaps you remember how The Institutes tie together knowledge of God and knowledge of self?  For such diverse Christians as John Calvin and Teresa of Avila, these two things are intertwined and inseperable.  And for both, self-knowledge is both a duty and a gift.  Self-knowledge is revelation from God just as knowledge of God is revelation from God.   The word "revelation" speaks for itself here: God reveals himself and is revealed to human beings--in Christianity, you can't come to the knowledge of God by yourself, it has to be a gift from God.  If you think you've come to the knowledge of God by yourself, what you've actually come to (as Calvin nicely puts it) is the knowledge of an idol--something you've made up in your own mind that may resemble God in some ways, but won't in other ways.  And it won't be him, and you won't have drawn closer to him with that knowledge, so the project is pretty much moot at that point.
   But things that are both gifts and duties are tricky to keep in proper balance and proper dependence on God.  If you are prone to having an overactive sense of responsibility as I am, it is easy to confuse the boundaries between responding to God's initiative and gifting in gratitude and obedience and taking on burdens to do things it is impossible for human beings to do in their own power.  For me, I tend to get so wrapped up in my quest for knowledge that I forget that knowledge is revelation, knowledge of God and self especially so.  I am much more inclined to view self-knowledge as a project for me to complete, and a project that I am responsible to complete.  And in my worse moments, to judge other people for not knowing themselves--for doing so poorly on this project, or for failing in their duties to self-knowledge.
   In this particular case, I woke from this dream with a sense of relief.  Lately, I had had the feeling (though I wasn't quite aware of it) that I was epically failing in knowing myself.  There were parts of myself I just didn't understand and frankly that I had not the time, energy, skill or wisdom to address.  They weren't necessarily problematic parts of myself--just parts of myself that I either hadn't seen in a why or were new to me.  I didn't know what they meant or what I was going to do about it, and while I had decided to accept those parts of myself, I didn't understand them and that made me a bit nervous.  I kept wondering, am I doing the right thing here by just accepting myself and moving forward?
   The answer I recieved was "yes" and helps free a facet of my personality that I do know isn't the most helpful: getting stuck locking things down with enough certainty to get Descartes to at least grudgingly nod his head at me.  Oftentimes, that's a waste of time or an impossible enterprise, but it often doesn't look that way to me: it seems more like a moral responsibility to pursue that kind of certainty--and what more important place to start than the knowledge of who I am as a person?
   Now, and particularly with the help of a dream, I can see what a rabbit-hole that is.  If all our theology is right and humans are these gloriously complex, weighty, and deep creatures . . . my intellectual and moral enterprise didn't stand a chance.  I actually can't achieve what I'm hoping to achieve.  In my humanity, I'm actually not capable of fully understanding my humanity.  But God already understands it, and he's going to help me see and know and understand in the ways that are proper to do so.  Through this dream, I was freed from my over-active sense of responsibility, which was telling me I had to know myself perfectly, on my own, with little or no help from God.  That's generally a bad combination of assumptions, and this was no exception.
    Well, that's it.  Except for two more things.  I was thinking that I know why the scrolls were gold and the writing was read.  Gold is a useful symbol because it is precious metal that is beautiful and does not rust.  That's why it symbolizes things that are supposed to last forever: like human beings, like love, like our most important promises.  Red is the color of blood and can symbolize life, which is the function it served here.

Dreamform One: Jesus Walks Into a Dream

The first dream that I can remember that ever really mattered to me was one in which Jesus actually showed up in person.  I have never had another dream like it and it certainly made me pay attention at the time.

In the dream, I was walking along the shore of the Sea of Galilee.   I remember looking at the row of ships on docks off to my left, and to my right was nothing much beside sand.  At some point, I remember peering down onto the deck flooring of a ship that was curiously clear--I could see straight down into the water.  That was a moment of fun outside of the dream and wonder within the dream.  At some point--I had no sense of being in a hurry--I wandered up to where Jesus was.  He was working on mending some nets and seemed also in no particular hurry.

If I was surprised to see him there, I wasn't very much surprised: it was the sort of surprise you have when you're not exactly expecting to see a friend to show up in a place where he or she might very well naturally show up, but you like your friend so much you are excited to see him or her anyway.  So I was a little excited to see Jesus, but not crazy excited to see him as I would be if I turned around in my living room now and saw him standing there.

I knew very clearly in the dream that I could ask Jesus anything at all that I wanted to, although I had no particular sense of anxiety or nervousness about it.  So, naturally, I asked him some wandering and convoluted question about how one should interpret some complicated problem of "authorial voice" in Scripture.  My question had something to do with both epistemology and ontology and I think had some relevance to some modernist quibbling about the inspiration of Scripture.  Honestly, I don't quite remember exactly what I asked, but since Jesus never quite got around to answering my question, I suppose that didn't matter too much.  What did matter and what was remarkable and what was the lesson for me was how he responded to my question.

The first thing Jesus did was actually think about my question.  He mulled over my question for a moment, asked me a clarifying question that went along the lines of, "So what you're really asking is x because of y and z?"  In turn, I thought about it for a little while and rephrased my question with his question in mind.  All the while, I noticed this sort of scrawny, mopey looking young man with quite the bush of thick brown hair sort of skulking around the edges of our conversation.  At some point he wandered off down a pier, looking remarkably sad and forlorn.  Jesus and I were still talking, but I remember watching the guy and feeling sort of sorry for him and distressed for him at the same time.  (I got the impression this was the Apostle John of all people.)  Both my eyes and Jesus' eyes followed the young man down the pier.

Jesus then interrupted our conversation by saying that he needed to go and talk to him.  Then he put down whatever he was working with in his hands, followed John down the pier, and put his arm around his shoulders.  I remember watching that and wondering whether I should feel put off because Jesus ditched me to go talk to someone else.  Oddly, I didn't really feel ditched.  I milled around the pier for a few minutes, not sure what I was going to do next, and then I woke up.

At first, I was rather puzzled by the dream.  Why have a dream with Jesus in it, in which he didn't really say anything to me that was informative?  Why get a chance to ask any question, but not have the question answered?  I puzzled over it for a moment or two, but then I went off to do my daily morning routine of Morning Prayer plus hymn singing.  The hymn I opened to, unplanned, happened to be: "There's a Wideness in God's Mercy" by Frederick Faber.  After I sang through especially verse 3, I knew exactly why I had dreamed the dream.  The meaning of the dream was threefold: One, that Jesus is far more human than I believe him to be,  two, that Jesus is far kinder than I believe him to be, and three, that Jesus "speaks my language".

The dream was meant to be corrective of the kind of "gnostic" or overly-spiritualized intuition I had about Jesus--that he was "god in a bod" (Apollinarian heresy)--God's mind in a human body.  The Jesus I spoke to actually had to think about my questions and process them and respond to me in a human and therefore limited way.  What I was really surprised about in the dream was how sharp and incisive Jesus' question was: the way he began to consider my question showed that he could more than keep up with me intellectually, and I've always been a little paranoid about the fact that the Jesus in the gospels doesn't seem to be a nerd, so how could he really relate to me.  (More on that in another post.)  I was being myself and Jesus seemed to be being himself when he asked a nerd question about my nerd question.  Fascinating.

But the dream was also corrective in that I tend to think of God the Father and the Son as strict disciplinarians, partly because of my own upbringing.  It genuinely hadn't occurred to me that the first thing Jesus would do with John was just give him a hug instead of, say, scolding him for acting like a baby.  In the dream, I felt some degree of compassion for John, but I didn't expect Jesus to.  I expected him to demand that John grow up and behave more sensibly.  That Jesus is so naturally and casually compassionate and kind  . . . that really hadn't been a part of my image of God.

The Jesus "speaking my language" bit now reminds me quite a bit of the Luke 5 text wherein Jesus goes fishing with Simon and basically says, "You think I don't know how fishing works?  I know how fish work so well they just do what I want."  When I read that text, I see Simon confronted with the fact that he's honored by this rabbi's interest in him, but he really doesn't know what Jesus has to do with his life.  But then Jesus says through his actions, "I own this, I own fishing, I know how it all works, I know and have mastered your livelihood--so why don't you trust me, and moreover, why don't you just come follow me already?"  In my dream, Jesus was telling me, "You know, I really get the life of the mind.  I really have that down.  You don't actually have to worry that I won't understand you or we'll run out of things to talk about or I won't be interested in you or your life.  Actually, I own all this, and I made it all up and it's all beautiful and fascinating--so why don't you stop dithering and come, follow me?"

Anyway, that's the impression I get about the dream and one of the reasons I rather like dreams, and rather like when Jesus walks into one.


"For the love of God is broader
than the measure of man's mind;
and the heart of the Eternal
is most wonderfully kind.
If our love were but more faithful,
we should take him at his word;
and our life would be thanksgiving
for the goodness of the Lord."


~Third stanza of Faber's "There's a Wideness in God's Mercy"

Creative Writing and the Spirit of Celebration

I suppose that many writers write for many reasons and out of many motivations.  I imagine one could spend a great deal of time cataloging those reasons, and could come up with a fantastic array of vices and virtues, healthy and abnormal psychological conditions.  I used to wonder what sort of mood fed my times of most intense creative writing--especially the reams and reams of ink on works of fiction (each ream having 500 or so pages, quite literally).  At some point in time, I called it "joy", but I think it is more verbal than that--I think I write fiction especially when I am in times of celebration, and find it difficult to write when I lose touch with that sense of celebration.

I originally entitled my blog "sublimation" because the bits of non-fiction writing I've been most happy with lately (because they've been the most creative) have been bits of sublimation: things I have written to process that have been caught up in something a little bit better than my confusing whirl of thought and emotion about them.  In the past, my fiction creative writing has been much different--it has been an almost aggressive pursuit and delight in aspects of God's creation (all of it--physical, spiritual, personal), God's own self, and God's interaction with us.  There's something about writing fiction and I think fantasy/science-fiction in particular that lets one really grasp creation--createdness--by two hands and shake it in joyous enthusiasm.  Tolkien and Lewis had their conception of "sub-creation" by which an artist of some kind enters into the similar (analogously so) kind of work that God does in creation.  In writing a story, I get to celebrate all of God's marvelous creativity by demonstrating the creation's awesome contingency: the fact that it could be, it has been, and it will be other than it is right now, and that is a good thing!  No where else is God's generosity and plenitude on display than in the vastness of the cosmos . . . and the sci-fi/fantasy section at Barnes and Nobles!  This is a part of God's own mind and character that we get to see and imitate whenever we do art, and especially when we imagine alternate worlds and histories and species and persons.  Paradoxically, we illuminate what is and call to mind what could be by celebrating what is not.

Question 44 of the Summa Theologica is the first "question" that Thomas Aquinas puts to exploring the creation and it goes like this: "The procession of creatures from God, and of the first cause of all things."  (As you can see, the question isn't exactly in question form . . . this probably isn't a case of allofunctional implicature, but I will bring it up anyway.)  I love this "question" and especially the grand use of the term "procession" almost as much as I love Boethius' definition of eternity.  Aquinas uses the term "procession" somewhat loosely.  God has both internal processions and external processions.  The internal ones are nothing less than the Personal processions of Son and Spirit and the external procession is the creation as a whole.  Procession simply refers to God as source, but it gives such a richness to the imagery!  When I think of the creation "processing" from God (though not from his being and substance, of course), I think of everything God has made marching before his throne in humble but joyous celebration of the goodness of God and the goodness of the gift of their own creation and existence.  That, perhaps, is why celebration is the key to my creative writing.  When I write, I celebrate the goodness of the created order and my own creation: I celebrate everything particular to that order, it's richness, its giftedness, its contingency, its fleetingness, the fact that it must begin and end.

Which is also why I'm not always in the mood to celebrate the createdness of the creation.  Oftentimes, I am more frightened than joyous at the fact that neither creation nor myself are necessary beings.  Oftentimes, I want to be a determinist because I want to be able to figure out all things before hand.  Or, I want to be a panentheist and be merged with God such that I am just as necessary to exist as God.  In short, I often either want to make an idol of myself or of the world in order to bring false comfort to myself that all is safe and sturdy and secure.  Contingency and giftedness displace us from occupying a too central role even in our own estimation because it displaces us ontologically, at the very root of our existence and our being.  But all false comfort is ultimately poison, and when I try to make myself too necessary (logically, ontologically, relationally) I end up making a burden for myself that I cannot possibly bear and web myself in with anxieties.    When I really trust God enough to relinquish control to him and accept my existence and my life and my being as the contingent, unneccesary, but beloved gift that I am, I can start opening my heart and hands to embrace createdness and creation again.  Otherwise, I close my heart and resent everything I don't know and don't understand.  I would rather have the spirit of adventure, but the spirit is willing while the flesh is weak.

There's something that happens in the transition from childhood to adulthood that makes most of us have to learn how to accept again.  (In many childhoods, anyway.)  Both my childhood and adolescence were fairly undisturbed and thus free to be filled with wonder. But when I ran off to college I found myself confronted with crises after crises of different sorts (some personal, some epistemological, some in matters of faith) that made trusting God and myself and the basic goodness of the world quite a bit more of a challenge!  I imagine some people never experience basic trust of the world in that way, and some people never have that trust shaken.  But I wonder whether the majority of people have a hiccup or two at the beginning or end of adolescence and have to learn again what it means to be a child.  I also imagine that many of us spend a great deal of time flubbing this lesson and having to be taken through it again and again until we really learn how to be led to Jesus like little children.

There's something childlike about joy and celebration--which makes it harder for those of us who feel the need to be sober-minded adults much of the time.  I don't have anything against genuine adulthood--in fact, praise Jesus if you actually manage to become a self-respecting, contributing adult.  But not if it makes you boring and self-protective and think you are the one who must be in control and in charge of your life.  That pose sometimes makes me feel more secure or more adult, but it also makes me curl up in on myself and have less to give and less to celebrate.

Art is one of the closest things we have to pure gift on this side of the veil.  Ultimately we engage in art for the sake of beauty and not for the sake of utility.  We know that beauty makes life better, but only because it appears that human beings are made for beauty, not because of any "practical" gain or reason.  The thing that refreshes us about the imagination-in-act is that it awakens us to our true nature--to our true identity as beings given an identity for no other reason that we were thought by One to be lovely, to be worthy, to be gift.  In life we are receivers before we are ever givers, and what we receive is as deep as our own bodies, souls, and minds.

Enneagram and Identity: What makes Enneagram Distinct from Myers-Briggs and All the Rest

I am not claiming to be an expert on the Enneagram or on Myers-Briggs (or the thousand other personality tests and inventories), but from my amateur study of the two, I have reached a couple of preliminary conclusions.  As I said in my previous post, I think Myers-Briggs is interested in providing a description of how cognitive processes work in human beings, but makes no claims about what human identity is or ought to be.  The Enneagram is different.  It has a "narrative" so to speak, about the origin of human personality and the neuroses thereof, and the story of redemption is about a return to the primeval harmony.  In most accounts, although some tend to Christianize the Enneagram, the story is what I would call secularized pantheism.  The problem is mostly one of being reconnected to the One, but the One is not necessarily Other, nor is the One a discreet Person, as far as I can tell.  (Actually, the way the folks on the Enneagram Institute's website tend to talk about the relation between the individual and the One reminds me more of Spinoza's Ethics than anything else, but that may be coincidence.  They point to medieval mystic traditions of all sorts, and back to Plato or Pythagoras, if I'm not mistaken.)
 
Though I am by no means a pantheistic and am not quite sure what I think about "secularized mysticism" of the kind proposed by the folks at the Enneagram Institute*, I do find the Enneagram's understanding of the connection between personality and identity to be one of the most helpful in contemporary psychology.  In this, the Enneagram seems to be in tune with what much of Christian mysticism (especially medieval mysticism) has said about personality, and I find this true, helpful, and mostly unsaid in modern settings.

   What the Enneagram writers and the Christian mystics (and possibly other mystics) agree on is this: personality--the sum of habit, inclination, predisposition, orientation, and desire in a human being is not necessarily helpful, and it is not necessarily essential to our identity.  In fact, personality (our inclinations, habits, predispositions, orientations, likes, dislikes, loves, hatreds) oftentimes gets in the way of true identity formation.  Personality is either unshaped or it is misshaped or it needs to be reshaped or finished--and some parts of personality have to be abolished altogether in order for the person to be made whole.  The Enneagram folks will say that every person is a sum of all the Enneagram points as represented by numbers 1-9, and the number you identify as is the way that your personality has become fixated on a certain thing.  In other words, personality--the fact that I am a "5"--is much more about how my soul has wrapped itself around my own brokenness than it is about anything else.  And what self-work in the Enneagram is is a way of getting "unfurled"--a way of relaxing into who you really are, a way of easing yourself out of being wrapped up in yourself out of some anxiety or knowledge of some deficiency in yourself or in the world.

If you're even a passing admirer of the work of Martin Luther, perhaps my description of the Enneagram makes it sound like Luther's description of original sin--that human beings are all incurvatus in se--all curved in on themselves.  Inflamed with the love of self and cold toward God and neighbor.  The way the Spanish mystics such as Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, and Ignatius of Loyola used to describe it, human beings are attached to the wrong things.  Part of our cure is being detached from wrong things (mostly creatures, created things) in wrong ways (i.e., idolatrous ways), re-attached to God in the proper way, so that we can also be present but non-attached to creatures.  John of the Cross' famous Dark Night of the Soul is all about this journey of proper attachment and non-attachment.  And for him there are two dark nights--the first is "sensible" (about stuff: feelings, experiences, etc) and the second is "intellectual" (about the work of reason, the intellect, knowing, the possession of the good).  But both nights are about deprivation--God deprives first the sensible part of human beings, and then the whole intellect of knowledge, sensation, use, in order to correct their disordered attachments to wrong things.  (This is why the theological virtues--faith, hope, and love must lead.  God must lead where we cannot even see, especially where we cannot we have gone wrong.)  In other words, this correction in the form of deprivation occurs in order to reform identities properly.  But what ends up happening is that the mature person, having died to self as one might also call it, has become less involved with their own inclinations.  Those inclinations are purified, reformed, remade, brought back into submission to reason and to faith and ultimately to God.  That is the work of the dark night and that is the work of sanctification.

The idea that we can love the wrong things in the wrong way is by no means unique to the medieval period.  It's essential to the whole scheme of virtue ethics and can be found in different forms in both Aristotle and Augustine.  For Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics of course moral virtue is about the proper response (the mean between extremes) to emotion or desire.  For Augustine, having the right loves is essential to living well, but we need the Spirit of God to give us love and to reshape our loves.  The Enneagram is helpful because it is friendly to the idea that we need to change and be reshaped, and that our identity does not .  depend on our behavior or even on what we see in ourselves at this very moment.  Myers-Briggs can sometimes be used superficially--"See, look, the MBTI says I'm like this, so don't ask me to change."  The Enneagram calls us to deeper observation and to the continual work of transformation.

I'm not knocking Myers-Briggs.  I think cognitive process theory is helpful, especially when what we struggle with is the fact that someone gets at the world differently than I do.  For that, it's a nice idea to do a nice jaunt through the pages of a good MB book or website.  It can be a great aide for self-knowledge or even for just helping one think more clearly about how to play well with others or with the world.  It can be helpful for self-acceptance or acceptance of fundamental non-moral ways in which human beings are different.   But I don't think it addresses the problem of transformation or discerning the difference between personality and identity.  For that, the Enneagram is an unexpected ally to the Christian agenda, even if the Christian response to questions about identity and transformation go deeper and are not, I hope, a sophisticated form of pantheistic monism!



*I am much too much a supernaturalist to be happy with any sort of system that doesn't take mysticism seriously.  Either someone is communing with God in a mystical experience, or being distracted by demons.  It is nothing to play with and vague notions about "the One" do leave me concerned about who exactly people are talking with.  The enemy does take every advantage, whether we want him to or not.)