Enneagram Retreat and Epiphany
“The good news is we have a God who remembers who we are, the person he knit together in our mother’s womb, and he wants to help restore us to our authentic selves.”
—Ian Morgan Cron and Suzanne Stabile in The Road Back to You (IVP Books, 2016), p. 23.
Recently our rector at St. Mark’s, Danny Schieffler, invited the staff to the retreat center for our diocese, Camp Mitchell, to study the enneagram with Presbyterian minister and therapist Rebecca Spooner. Usually staff day-retreats are about planning sessions for the year or exercises using the Myers-Briggs Personality Inventory to help us see how we can relate to each other.
Knowing someone else’s enneagram number can be helpful; but the real heart of the enneagram is about personal growth—how to identify the mask you have developed for survival. It is designed to enable you to free your true self, the person that God created you to be.
So our rector was giving us a day for our own personal enrichment, away from our usual work, during a busy liturgical season. I wish I had done that for my staff when I was working in the medical field, to let them know how much I cared about their own personal growth. Let this remain an example for all of us.
This was my third enneagram study course. The well-known sin of my enneagram number is pride, and dealing with it was front and center when I heard about the retreat. I already knew all this. Today I am still amazed how things came together at our retreat, and how much more I learned. This is my second lesson. Exposure to a spiritual tool such as the enneagram can be more enlightening each time we go through this process. Find out more about an enneagram retreat with Rebecca Spooner tomorrow.
Rebecca Spooner is leading a morning retreat about the Enneagram at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church on Saturday February 29th from 9 to 1. The Cost is $15. Sign up on St. Mark’s website lovesaintmarks.org. Go to What’s on, then Events.
Joanna . joannaseibert.com