Understanding My Call

Call me self-centered if you will, but selecting books on the relationship of God and self seems an overly broad task. It is hard for me to read any book (excepting a technically specialized book) that I find appealing and not see God and myself and contemporary life reflected in it even if that reflection is of how dissimilar or different other people, circumstances or experiences may be from my own. It is all about me and yet none of it is about me, even myself. That is a paradox and blessing of spirituality.

As an example of this, our first book, The Comforting Whirlwind: God, Job and the Scale of Creation by Bill McKibben (Cowley; 2005; $13.95) is in the broadest sense about the environment and our relationship to it explored through the words of the book of Job. It is also about countering orthodoxies. Orthodoxies, it seems to me, are mostly not chosen. The most tenacious we hold with a fervor in proportion to the obscurity of their origins and their slim confirmation by our experience. It does not seem fair that good people should experience suffering in this world and bad people shouldn’t. Ergo, if you suffer you must be bad. That is the argument of Job’s friends and today’s preachers of the gospel of success. Who knows where this orthodoxy comes from—certainly not the Bible—but I would guess that parental reward of good behavior plays its part (and who could do away with that important socialization tool)?

Another such orthodoxy is that growth is good. Perhaps its origins are in the prohibitions placed on children from doing this or that until they get bigger. Guided by Job, McKibben argues these kinds of orthodoxies are really about how the world would be better if designed by humans instead of God. Unfortunately for our comfort and our orthodoxies, God did design it. It is not all about us. Ouch. A Biblical faith would seem to require a constant reevaluation of those semi-conscious measurements we make of cause and effect, good and bad, self and other, human and the rest of creation, creature and creator. This slim volume speaks mightily through its examination of the environment about the relationship of self and God.

In an entirely different vein, one explicitly about me and God, is The Enneagram: A Journey of Self Discovery by Maria Beesing, Robert J. Nogosek, and Patrick H. O’Leary (Dimension Books; 1984; $14.95) The enneagram is a psycho-spiritual tool that describes nine (enneas in Greek) basic personality types. Like all good oral traditions its origins are shrouded with layers of myth. It was introduced to the United States by the psychologist Oscar Ichazo but has achieved its widest continuous use as a tool in spiritual direction by the Jesuits and others. My wife, Susan, was introduced to it by her spiritual director about 15 years ago and so followed my introduction. Alas, in the last decade it has been labeled evil by some misinformed folk and so most of the Catholic publishing houses have dropped their faith based enneagram books, leaving the field to a kind of poppsych general press approach to the subject. There are some decent books of that type out there and if you contact me through the magazine I can recommend some. To try and wrap the enneagram in a very concise description it would be this:

We all have strengths. We think the world would be better if everyone had those strengths. (Does that sound like an orthodoxy of self?) The problem is that these strengths are really compulsions. They are me reacting, not me consciously choosing a response. Because they are so much part of who we are, we do not see when they are inappropriate or cause pain to others. The compulsion and its accompanying blindness form our sin—that which separates us from God and others. Furthermore, when we try to make it better, that is, when we focus our compulsive behavior on our compulsion with the good intent to fix it, we only dig the hole deeper. We are completely dependant upon God’s grace for our salvation and our psychological health. That doesn’t mean we don’t lend a helping hand, but we can’t fix ourselves.

The enneagram is powerful stuff and this book both helps you identify your type and speaks to some theological undergirding of the system.

And speaking of personality types, the well known Meyers-Briggs personality system is based on the work of Carl Jung. Jung has become somewhat of an icon as a modern mystic for his work to incorporate psychology with spirituality—the collective unconscious, synchronicity, and his almost Eastern approach to consciousness as separate from ego. Unfortunately it seems his language has often been more appropriated than his work has been read. For an eminently readably, unified and informed introduction to his thought, I would highly recommend Jung’s Map of the Soul by Murray Stein (Open Court; 1998; $18.95). In it you will find the nuggets of great wisdom that this thoroughly scientific mind uncovered during his lifelong exploration of the human psyche and its relation to the unknowable and the divine.  

David Davies is co-owner of Soul Desires bookstore in Omaha NE with his wife, the Rev. Susan Davies.