Father Richard Rohr interviewed by Andrea Isaacs and Jack Labanauskas in the fall of 1997

Father Richard Rohr

Enneagram Monthly: What have you been doing with the enneagram lately?

Richard Rohr: Although I still use the enneagram a great deal in spiritual direction, it’s not something I teach publicly a lot anymore. It’s not because I don’t believe in it, or admire it; my admiration for its truth is deeper than ever. It’s just that there are so many things in my life that I’m doing, and because many other people really want to teach the enneagram, and I think they are very good at it, I let them do it, and I’ll do the other things that no one else is doing.

EM: You were referring to what you do as “spiritual direction”…

RR: I am doing a lot of private spiritual direction, a lot of public spiritual guidance in conferences, and a lot of masculine spirituality; scripture and spirituality would the real areas where I feel most confident and most needed.

EM: How did you come to integrate the enneagram into what you just described?

RR: I was in I guess the second circle that learned the enneagram, back in 1972, from the group that came out from Berkeley. One of them, Father Jim O’Brien, a Jesuit, just happened to be my Spiritual Director in Cincinnati. At that time, he used the enneagram to spiritually direct me. As you probably know, those first ten years or so, from about ’71 to the early ’80s, it was still pretty secret, we were supposed to keep it to ourselves. In a way, I have reverted to that. Not that I think it’s wrong to teach it; it’s clearly helping so many people. But I don’t teach it that much publicly. Now I just use it more in one-to-one guidance for people, helping them to break through their own blockages. Sometimes I reveal the enneagram and encourage them to use it to further themselves, or to study it. Sometimes I just use it and there’s no need to really open up the whole system for the person; their mind isn’t interested in that direction, they don’t have a need in that direction—so it’s really nice that I can use it that way.

EM: So it helps in terms of getting insight into their motivations without letting on what you’re doing.

RR: Right, exactly—insight into what’s blocking them. When it was first used for me, it was like the old Catholic terminology from the Middle Ages of “reading the soul.” It really helped Jim O’Brien, my Spiritual Director, to read my soul back in the early ’70s. He had been studying in Berkeley with Claudio Naranjo that summer of ’71…

EM: With Bob Ochs?

RR: I guess so. And then he came back and used it with me. So it has become a means for reading the soul, and thereby healing the soul. Of course people attribute all this wisdom to you, and think you’re so intelligent or a pipeline to he Holy Spirit! —but in fact you’re using the enneagram.

EM: How do you decide when to tell someone about the enneagram ?

RR: It depends on the interest level and the education level of the person. I’m living here in a Mexican barrio in Albuquerque. Last night I was helping at the parish because the pastor was gone, and people were coming in for confession and counseling in the afternoon. With folks in that context, there’d be no need for me to mention the enneagram. They wouldn’t be interested in it—they’d be bored by it probably, or confused by it. So, I would, just again, use the insights from what I can see, the energy I’m picking up from them.

We have a Guest House around the corner here, where people come from all over the world, from Europe and so forth, oftentimes activists, people from a higher level of education and experience. For them I will say “Are you familiar with the enneagram?” I try never to simply type someone, but at least open up the conversation, and if there is an openness to move in that direction, I encourage them to examine it. If, down the road, after several conversations, it would seem helpful to tell them, “Why don’t you look at the third type, the fourth type, or whatever it might be,” then I do so.

EM: You then refer them to your book?

RR: Mine or others. Mine, of course, is built very much on Judeo-Christian values, and a lot of people are not there, and I don’t try to make them be there. Often times, I’ll recommend other books.

EM: Which are your favorite books?

RR: I do like Dobson/Hurley, I do like Helen Palmer, and I do like Riso. Certainly they are three of the big well-known authors. I like them because I think their clinical descriptions are just good. Maybe they don’t always bring the spirituality in the way I’d like to bring it out, but that doesn’t make their teaching not good. I think very often their clinical descriptions, if I can say it that way, are cleaner and more insightful than mine. I’m often trying to make too many points, instead of one or two clearly.

EM/Jack: I would argue that, in my case the description of the Epicurean aspect of the Seven in your book, was an eye-opener. I recognized my childhood dreams right there.

RR: So you’re a Seven?

EM: I probably am. That was the closest description of me that I’ve come across anyway.

RR: Sevens are good for me, because as you know I’m a One, and I can tend to be too serious, too driven, and too focused. Many of my best friends are Sevens, and I always enjoy their company.

EM: So the way you see yourself as different from other authors or teachers is that you’re more into spiritual work and less into the analytical aspects of the enneagram?

RR: That’s probably a good way to say it. Yes, spirituality for me is my life and the “big” issue. I use a distinction that may be helpful for you: the calculative mind and the contemplative mind. I think, as a culture and as a people, and as an educated people, we’re all trained in the calculative mind, and that’s good. By that I mean the desire to fix things, to explain things, to control things, to understand things, to work with the data. And that’s needed. But in terms of spirituality, what you really need is to let go of the calculating mind and move toward the contemplative mind, which is much more panoramic, which doesn’t need to fix it, doesn’t need to understand it, and doesn’t need to control it. And that really is how my approach would be a little different than a lot of the other teachers.

EM: Can you give a practical (calculating mind!) example of how you use the enneagram to help one move from the calculating mind towards the contemplative mind?

RR: One uses “the enneagram insight” to open up surrender and humility in a person—not to give them another way to self-absorb, self-explain, self-fix, or even self-control. The judgmental One must first “weep over his sin” rather than set out to judge and correct his judgmentalism which only deepens his egocentricity. His judgements remain the reference point instead of the mercy of God.

EM: Do you see it as an either/or…calculating or contemplative?

RR: No, it should not have to be. I use the calculative mind a lot. If I didn’t have a calculative mind, I don’t think I could be a teacher. So you’re absolutely right. The art form is when you can use both: when you can use the calculative mind, but only to move beyond it, and to let go of it, to see things more panoramically, more in depth, and through the eyes of God.

EM: How would you use the enneagram to help move more towards the contemplative mind?

RR: This would be my main criticism—that I feel a lot of the teaching has not done that, has not helped people move into the contemplative mind. Because of its very brilliance and its excitement and its insight, it is almost, for many folks, it seems to be another excuse to keep you in the calculative mind, to keep you judging, fixing, explaining, controlling, and needing to understand. Spirituality is always about love. Don’t romanticize that word. By “love” I mean union, deep re-union with yourself, with what is, with your Maker, with God. The temptation is to substitute union or love with…knowledge, gnosis, higher states of consciousness.

EM: Adam and Eve and the tree…

RR: Exactly, exactly, yes, that’s a great fit, “eating the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.” Our lust for knowledge and control is the great blinding sin in our creation stage.

EM: Eating the tree rather than the apple, that’s very good… you chop the tree down and make a lot of toothpicks. Just think of how many obstacles they could clean up that are lodged here and there.

RR: (Laughter) Okay, we can go down that road, too! But you’re getting my train of thought: the movement from gnosis, from higher states of consciousness, from mind, away from love, is always the temptation in the world of religion, and I think it always undoes religion, and that’s why we’ve gotten into this fundamentalist silliness, this legalism, that we get into with Catholics—it’s substituting that desire to fix, to control, and to understand for the pure religious desire to be in union. I think the pure enneagram is about love, is about union. I don’t by any means want to be criticizing or putting down anybody, but some of the conflicts that we’re all aware of inside of the enneagram movement, and I probably won’t let you print this, but I think have been in part because it has become another way to be right, another way to know, another way to fix, another way to understand, instead of another way to “let go.”

EM: Are you referring to the conflicts that occurred after Claudio’s SAT group?, or the conflict that occurred before that, between Oscar/Arica and the enneagrammers?

RR: All of them.

EM: Or even Gurdjieff . . .

RR: Yes, there has been a history of conflictual relationships between great enneagram teachers, and I do mean great. It’s so easy when you get a tool or instrument of knowledge, it’s so easy to use it as ammunition, to use it as power. I think in the West, that’s what we do with everything. It’s just so deep in our mythic way of approaching reality, that we almost don’t know how to move beyond it. So, I guess I’m looking at the whole history of conflict, starting at the very beginning.

EM: When you say the “beginning,” or the original enneagram, or the deeper soul of it, what do you really mean by that? To you, where does the enneagram come from?

RR: First, I have to say I don’t know, and I don’t care in some ways. I was excited by the possibility that Evagrius Ponticus could be a great-great grandfather, in that research that Andreas Ebert did, and that Lynn Quirolo did. I work with so many Christian and Catholic groups that it gave them one less reason to dismiss it or to avoid it, thinking that it might have, at least in part, some Christian roots.

EM: Rather than being Satanic, for instance?

RR: Yes, or any other rationalization to dismiss or avoid it. And it isn’t important to me to prove that Evagrius Ponticus was one of the founding minds, but he might well have been. He was certainly in the part of the world, in the century, that makes it believable. The idea that it was refined among the Muslims, and then continued in the deep tradition of spiritual direction certainly makes sense to me, too. It’s hard to deny that Gurdjieff did a lot with it. I feel he got a little bit lost in numerology, which I tend to mistrust. Many have added their parts. So, I guess I just see it as an evolving tradition of wisdom, and I don’t know the beginning point. And I guess that’s probably even best, that we don’t know the beginning point. And certainly Oscar Ichazo was a part of the evolution and development, and made a contribution. At the very beginning, he was talking about not affirming the ego, but stripping the ego—and I think he’s right on in that. Whether it’s had that effect, I don’t know.

EM: Good intentions are one thing, success is somewhat harder.

RR: So often we carry part of the mystery, part of the truth, and pass it on, and I know I’ve done this, I’ve taught very good things to people that I haven’t lived up to myself. We’re often cracked vessels carrying these great bits of wisdom, and just because we don’t integrate them perfectly ourselves, it doesn’t mean we don’t have truth. I think that would probably be true of Evagrius Ponticus; he seems to have been a flawed figure, too, like we all are. There’s probably no great hero or heroine who perfectly put it together

EM: That’s such an elegant way of stating it—carrying wisdom in a cracked vessel. Surely the nature of wisdom could very well remain pure, although there would be less of it…

RR: The desire or expectation for pure wisdom is the desire to be God the Promethean temptation that must be resisted.

EM: How did you develop the descriptions of the types in your books? You must have taken some of the basics from the teachings you attended, and then added some of your own observations?

RR: Yes, I think the biggest part of it was with Jim O’Brian, and then we had a discussion group on the enneagram in New Jerusalem, which was the community where I was a pastor in Cincinnati for 15 years. That was from ’73-’83 when we were working on it in small groups. I think that’s where I developed an intuitive feel for the enneagram, where I developed a language, an intuition that I still operate out of today. It was mostly experiential use of it, and discussion of it ad nauseum those first 10-15 years, and from ’73-’83 in particular.

EM: How did these small groups go? What did you do in the groups? —did you do exercises, have panels, talk about a specific type each session, what criteria motivated the discussion?

RR: New Jerusalem is still there today—I went back for the 25th birthday of this community. It was a lay community, which I was supposed to have founded in ’71. This group of people gathered, we moved into a working class neighborhood, we bought up these old homes…by the late ’70s there were 400 people who had moved into this neighborhood. Today there are about 200 still there—it’s only half as big as when I left 11 years ago. We were a group of lay people, and I was the only priest. We were committed to social change and spiritual transformation. The whole community was divided into small groups that would meet every week. That’s where I first taught the enneagram. I taught it to the whole community, and they took it back to their small groups and it became sort of a lingua franca inside the community, from ’73-’83. There it just developed, and I developed with it. Those were the years. When did Helen Palmer’s book come out?

EM: In 1987. The Beesing/Nogosek/O’Leary book came out in 1984, and Don Riso’s book in 1986.

RR: That makes sense. Because it was about ’84 when I started realizing that this was starting to come out. I guess I made my tapes then, out here in ’86. Up to that time, my tapes were only for the internal community. We never published them or anything. Then, since it had come out in book form, in ’86 when I was already out here in Albuquerque, the National Catholic Reporter in Kansas City taped the next time I taught it, and those are the tapes that went national, and were part of the basis for the book, actually. I think the tapes actually came out before the book—I’m more a talker than I am a writer. That’s why almost all my books have co-authors. Other people tape my talking, like you’re doing here, and then transcribe it and make it into a book.

EM: How do you find those good souls?!

RR: (Laughter…) Well, Andreas [Ebert] is excellent, because he loves me, he knows my soul, he knows what I want to say. He always says the gift of translation requires that you love the person and you love the message. And I think he’s right. Again, it’s back to love. I think when you love the person and you love the message, and you want it communicated as badly as they do, I think you have the ability to read between the lines. After saying that, I’d say that an awful lot of my translators and transcribers and editors have not had that gift as much as Andreas has. So some of my books, I feel, are second- and third-rate. Because they’re more literal transcriptions, literal translations than communicating an idea or a personality, or a passion.

EM: How did you find Andreas? Wasn’t he in Germany?

RR: It must have been some time in the late ’70s or early ’80s. He came over to visit New Jerusalem Community in Cincinnati. He was a young Lutheran pastor at that time, and he came to learn from our community. I taught the enneagram to him.

EM: You were a Catholic priest?, and a Lutheran pastor comes to learn from a Catholic priest?!

RR: Yes (laughter!). Andreas and I spoke over there at the Kirchtag [German for “church day”], and the Protestants would ask me to wear my brown Franciscan robe which is so picturesque, and Andreas would stand next to me in his rather stern-looking Lutheran collar, and it would be a great symbol of ecumenism, just that we could work together. We joked about being Catholic and Lutheran.

EM: You’re a Franciscan monk, aren’t you?

RR: Friar is the word, not monk. It might seem like an artificial distinction, but we’re not monks.

EM: What’s the difference?

RR: A monk, from the word monacus, is one who lives alone, and in a monastery, and emphasizes solitude and quiet. A friar lives in a friary, or a convento, as they’d say in Italy, and our emphasis, from St. Francis, was always to mix with the people, to be in the middle of the city, to be a brother, frate in Italian, friar in English. We do not separate from people—that would be the historical difference between a monk and a friar.

EM: As to hierarchical rank, where is a Catholic priest, vis-a-vis the friar?

RR: Priesthood has nothing to do with it. Priesthood is a ministry for the sake of the church. Religious life is the way you live in community. It has nothing to do whether you’re ordained to the priesthood or not. It’s a personal commitment. So some Franciscans are priests, and some Franciscans are brothers. Some monks are priests, and some monks are brothers. And whether you’re ordained or not ordained is accidental.

EM: This is interesting…I (Andrea) am Jewish/Taoist, and Jack is Catholic/Buddhist.

RR: So you’re both naturally ecumenical! This is where I hope the enneagram can help us, to move in this direction between our historical religious divisions.

EM: I think Laleh Bakhtiar is working real hard trying to start something like this; she was really eager to get you to come to her “interfaith” meeting this November in Chicago

RR: She’s so sweet; I’ve known her from way back. I just listened to the video [of her presentation at the IEA conference in Baltimore] the other day. I’m not sure what the full message was, but I see it moving in an ecumenical direction. There was a very holy man who spoke afterwards…

EM: The Shaykh Kibbani…

RR: Yes, a wise good person. I express this as my own limitation, but I’m not sure I understood all of what they wanted to say, but I sure liked their energy and their commitment to wisdom and transformation.

EM: Richard, you have traveled quite a bit with your teaching and the retreats that you do. We’ve talked to a lot of people about aspects of type and how types might be expressed differently from country to country, and the effects that different cultures have on personalities. What is your experience with that? Do you perceive cultural differences in terms of type, and how easy is it to mis-perceive someone’s type when they’re from a different culture?

RR: I’m not going to be good at this because I never stay abroad long enough! I taught it in Japan way back in the early ’80s, before I was even teaching it over here. I felt free to teach it over there, and they begged me to teach it to them. I could tell they really related to the nine types, and understood them, and yet I have no doubt that a Japanese Four would be different from an American Four, that a Japanese Six would be different than an American Six.

EM: Which culture are you most familiar with, other than the American culture?

RR: In terms of the enneagram?

EM: No, personally, in terms of people.

RR: Probably Germany.

EM: You are of German origin, I presume?

RR: I am of German origin, although I was born in ’43 and we were ashamed of being Germans; it was the last thing we wanted to admit. So I never grew up with any identification as a German. And yet, when I went over there, I guess I’ve taught over there eight or nine times, I learned to love and deeply appreciate German people and German culture.

EM: You may have preferred to call yourself “Richard Pipe!” [Richard Rohr literally translated from German]

RR: (Laughter) You know German then? Reed, pipe, or tube. I’ve always liked it because it obviously has the image of a conduit or a transmitting vessel, and that’s what I wanted to be. I’ve liked the German name.

EM: To trumpet a message…

RR: Yes, the “roar,” too. I’ll admit, because of the war and all that, I grew up sort of ashamed and didn’t want to identify with it. I studied German philosophy and I always thought it was so heady and esoteric, disconnected. German theology, too, seemed so rarefied. But, I can’t deny that when I first started speaking in Germany, their love for ideas and their love to work with ideas—I mean, we’d go to the Biergartens [literally beer gardens, or pubs], and talk philosophy, psychology, theology, politics, religion, until two in the morning, and I loved it, I really did. They are an amazing people. Their headiness is exactly what I was talking about at the beginning—eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil led them into the most terrible ideology. Yet their mind is also their gift; unfortunately it usually ends up more calculative than contemplative.

EM: So perhaps a German in the US might be mis-typed as a Five because of the cultural inclination towards intellectual ideas.

RR: That’s interesting, because I have met exactly what you said. German men who like ideas, who like books, may not be Fives at all. Sometimes they’re Ones or Nines, but their Germanic background makes you think they’re a Five. I know three examples where that’s specifically true. Their Germanic love of left-brain ideas left them looking, if you didn’t know how to pick up the energy, like Fives. I myself am a non-stop reader. People could think I am a Five.

EM: That makes it confusing for someone in the US who came from another country. Say someone from Japan, where the culture is very Sixish, might come to the country and be seen as an obvious Six by how “we” perceive the types, but he or she may be a Four in hiding.

RR: Very good. We’re often subsumed into our national energy or our parent’s energy. Especially people who haven’t been able to define themselves, get in touch with their unconscious, walk their own path. It’s amazing how many people think they are their parent’s energy, and sometimes think they are their country’s energy, as you just said. They themselves may think they’re a Six, and we could think they’re a Six, but as you said, in reality a Four, or something else.

EM: I wonder if we need a different set of type descriptions for each country.

RR: I bet you’re right. I think in the next 25 years, that’s going to emerge. That there’s a basic validity there, though I’ll still stand by the nine types. I’ve taught it in Africa, Europe, and in Japan, the Phillippines, and I’m going to teach it in Australia in November, because they begged me to! I’m doing a three-week tour over there and they asked for one enneagram workshop. I’ll suspect they’re pretty much like us.

Stay tuned…continued next month.

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Father Richard Rohr is a Franciscan of the New Mexico Province. He was the founder of the New Jerusalem Community in Cincinnati, Ohio and the Center for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque, New Mexico. After thirteen years as a pastor of New Jerusalem and eight years as animator of the Center in Albuquerque, he handed them both over to lay leadership and direction.

Richard now lives in a Franciscan community in New Mexico and divides his public time between local work and preaching and teaching around the world. He considers the proclamation of the Gospel of Jesus to be his primary call, and uses many different platforms to communicate that message. Scripture studies, action and contemplation themes, community building, mission work, men’s spirituality, and the enneagram are all themes that he has made use of for the sake of the Gospel. He is always committed to “personal prayer to a personal God” and to a Franciscan bias toward liberation and the poor.

Richard was born in Topeka, Kansas in 1943. He entered the Franciscan Order in 1961 and was ordained to the priesthood in 1970. He received his Master’s Degree in Theology from the University of Dayton and did further study in Scripture at the University of Notre Dame and the University of San Francisco.

He is probably best known for his audio and video tapes, which are distributed by St. Anthony Messenger Press, Credence Cassettes, and through the Center’s newsletter, Radical Grace. Articles by Fr. Richard have appeared in numerous publications and much of his writing has been translated into other languages. He considers himself a “pseudo-author” however, because most of his books are edited forms of his tapes.

EM: How do you type people, as you go from culture to culture? You work in Germany and the US—you must use a different set of criteria. You’ve said you work with intuition—what do you look for when you’re trying to type someone?

RR: I mistrusted this when I first heard about it. In the last ten years, I have to say that people’s gestures, people’s body postures, the natural set of the face, is more and more a give-away. I know that can be wrong, but if you observe people and the way energy comes out from their bodies, their faces, and the way they walk… I’m getting better and better at that. It surprises me how right it usually is—especially the face. We Ones tend to have this serious look, always looking for deeper meanings, and always overly conscientious, with the knit eyebrows. I think it’s what I look for now, and I have found that it to be true cross-culturally.

EM: Once you get used to the Japanese face, or the Kenyan face…

RR: I needed to be in Africa for a few weeks first. I was in Africa for all of May, and after a few weeks, I could see how the African One (who wouldn’t get righteous about the same stupid things that I get righteous about) is still righteous and arrogant and legalistic about what he believes. Maybe it’s the nature of the village customs, or traditions, or something like that, but he’ll still have that One energy in the direction of what he needs to be righteous about.

EM: So you would agree with Oscar Ichazo, who typed from facial traits? From high quality photos he would determine type by observing where the tensions were held in the face.

RR: No, I couldn’t do that. I need to see a face in action, a face talking to me, a person gesturing and moving. I couldn’t do it from a photograph. But I would give him credit—I bet it is possible for someone as good as him.

EM/Andrea: This makes so much sense. I’m doing work with movement and the Enneagram, and recently met someone else who is doing non-verbal panels. I do think our emotional habits are engrained in how we carry our bodies, and how we physically react.

EM/Jack: And I used to do visual diagnosis for medical purposes which included observing the structure, color, hues, lines and other physical marks—the underlying presumption being that every detail had its origin deep in the body mind and soul…

RR: I think so. If we’re body/soul units, which we clearly are, why wouldn’t this show forth?

EM: One should be able to gauge where we’re at, just by looking at the body.

RR: If you’re good at it, and really picking up the energy, the cues. I know, like all good things, this can be misused. This can be another way to box people in, to classify people, to control people, and to stop listening or respecting others.

EM: So that’d be on your list of things not to do with the Enneagram?

RR: Right at the top, really.

EM: Remaining on the subject of typing, are there things you’ve tried that just didn’t work?

RR: Even when I do talk with people about what type I think they might be, I move into that gingerly and gently, and I always keep saying to them “I could be 100% wrong, and my fix on this can be incorrect; so give me permission to look at it differently later, and I want to give you permission to look at it differently.” There have been times when three days or a week later, I’ve had to put it inside a totally different gestalt. I had analyzed the data incorrectly. So, don’t rush to superficial analysis or diagnosis which is too often wrong.

EM: What do you think of the idea that we reflect one type in each triad? Our main type being primary, but having a secondary, and a then tertiary type in the other triads, quoting Oscar, in the same way that we use the self-preservation, the relational and the adaptation instincts in order to function?

RR: It makes sense. I haven’t studied it enough to say it’s always true. It makes sense though, it fits. It could lend itself, though, to what I was calling the calculative mind, I just hesitate whenever the Enneagram becomes too much of a formula. We used to have paint-by-number; I’ve seen the Catholic church have religion-by-formula, and I have so much mistrust of that, and I’ve already seen us do that with the Enneagram. Pull in heart, pull in gut, pull in mind. It’s true, but don’t try too hard, or you get back into formulaic spirituality.

EM: I thought it would be not that different from affixing one type to a person…

RR: You’re right, it isn’t that different. Where is my mistrust coming from? Maybe it doesn’t need to be there! I’m always convinced, like Einstein said, that the great truth is simple. And I guess my red flags go up whenever we try to make the Enneagram look complicated, or what I call formulaic. What you’re saying really isn’t that complicated, and I think perhaps you’re right. So don’t make too much of what I just said; I’ll have to think about it more.

EM: How do you get information, other than observation? What do you study, how do you keep in touch with new ideas, or do you even do it?

RR: You mean in terms of the Enneagram?

EM: For example, yes.

RR: I don’t read a lot on the Enneagram anymore, rather I’m just working with it. I do read a lot, as I told you before, but now it’s more the area of cultural analysis; I’ve been doing a lot of work on deconstruction of culture, trying to explain what’s been happening in America where so many people appear to be losing it. Most of my reading and studying are in areas other than the Enneagram. I am trying to understand Western civilization and the malaise that I think we’re in as a nation. We produce so many neurotic and narcissistic people. That really sounds like a One negative statement, but as a priest I am just overwhelmed.

I had three masses at the jail here this morning, which is a place where you might expect it, but there are a lot of people you almost have to rebuild from the bottom up, they’re so wounded and so hurt. Social analysis, history and psychology are probably my favorite areas of reading. “Quantum theory” is my recent fascination and lens.

EM: Do you have a theory of what it is that happened to our society that makes us appear to be going in that direction?

RR: I do, and I have a whole set of tapes that I can’t bore you with now. But in a nutshell: every healthy culture has lived inside of a mythic universal meaning that holds the soul of the psyche together. I’m not trying to make a big pitch for Judeo-Christianity, although it’ll sound like that—in 1962, Carl Jung said that the Judeo-Christian images are so deeply imprinted in the Western psyche, that if we were to abandon them, it would be a psychological catastrophe. We have nothing else to replace them with. He said he saw the beginnings of that abandonment, and gave the Western psyche 50 years before it fell apart. That was in ’62.

EM: He was generous!

RR: I find real prophesy in that quote. I come out here and see Polish guys from Chicago, and they come out here to New Mexico, and overnight they want to pretend that they’re an Indian. It’s a bastardization. It’s not their roots or tradition, and I do think we’ve got to build on our roots—our Jewish roots, our Christian roots, whatever they might be, where we came from. And you’ve got to integrate those. You can’t just dismiss them. I think they’re in the hard-wiring. And we’ve pretty much thrown out what Robert Bly calls the Hebraic-Christian-Islamic impulse control system. We thought we could start at zero and throw it all out. And it’s not working. The boundaries just aren’t there for people, the grounding just isn’t there for people. I think that was the wisdom of traditional cultures, that by-and-large you could stand on the shoulders of your grandparents and say they weren’t totally stupid. They might have been weak and fallen people like all of us, but that’s a great comfort and strengthening to the soul to be able to stand on the shoulders of your parents and grandparents—shadow and all!

EM: Yes, the Bhagavad Gita calls it the loss of dharma.

RR: That’s a very good way to say it. Bly in another place says it’s one of the first times in known human civilization that we have the collapsing of the eldering system. It’s one of the reasons I like the Enneagram, because I think the Enneagram re-establishes in a healthy way (if it’s used healthily) a good pattern of eldering, of spiritual direction and guidance, which is not authoritarian but still is guidance. It directs people to go within and to build on what I call the vertical*, rather than the horizontal* hall of mirrors we’re living in today.

EM: How would the Ennegram help with eldering?

RR: It can help because it isn’t authoritarian wisdom; it is experiential wisdom. But it still needs to be passed on by someone who has integrated that experiential wisdom. So you have the best of both worlds with the Enneagram. You can be a teacher, a spiritual director to a person, and you’re not compromising or apologizing for being 20 years ahead of them on the path; you don’t have to apologize for that, but you’re in fact putting them back on their own journey, their own resources, their own personality, and you’re guiding them. It’s the best use of authority, or leadership if you prefer that word, to in fact call forth the empirical, experiential, existential self.

Leadership which is for the sake of actualization and inner authority in the other makes itself unnecessary. Good Enneagram is both wisdom from without and from within. When the two connect, you have real strength and not just eccentric individualism.

EM: When you were talking about coming to a point, you said you allow your love for humanity to guide you. It sounds similar to what the Buddhists call “stream entry”—meaning, when you are pursuing a spiritual path, initially you do a lot of straining, stressing and huffing and puffing. There comes a point after you have worked hard on yourself where it becomes an attraction and you start being pulled or seduced into it instead of continually pushing and pressing. Would you say that when you develop an understanding and an insight into types, which builds naturally from observing people, one day it suddenly dawns on you, and then you discard the questionnaires you previously used?

RR: That’s exactly what I mean by the contemplative mind being preferred to the calculative mind. You have to start with the calculative mind, but you don’t want to stay there. You want to use it to move beyond it. You have to know the rules in order to break the rules. But the great truth is always bigger than the rules and formulas.

EM: Right. There still don’t seem to be any shortcuts, but at least you have the peace of mind that it’ll take a long time and you don’t presume that you can achieve something tomorrow.

RR: That’s exactly right, and that’s what I mean by true mentoring or eldering—the recognition that the integration we call wisdom is only attained through time and aging. You can’t be there the first year you learn the Enneagram; and I don’t think you can be there when you’re 25. Maybe this is easier for me to say because I’m 54 now!, but I can just feel the confidence of integration as I get older. It’s so much better to be older! Could this be what Einstein meant when he insisted that time and space were not two different entities, but somehow the same?

EM: Hmmm… Are there ideas you’ve published in your books that you would change today?

RR: One is that I’m way too hard on the Sixes in my tapes and in my book. I think I’m reacting against legalistic Catholicism and so many priests who taught me in the seminary who were Sixes. I think I’m reacting against the Germanic Six energy. Neither of my parents were Sixes, but I think a lot of the bad influences in my life, the Church, the seminary, German influences in my early Franciscan training, were unhealthy Six energy. As a result, I was pretty hard on the Sixes. I’m much kinder to the Six in my book called Enneagram II and my second set of Enneagram tapes.

Also, I tended to idealize the Nine more than I would now. (I still love Nines—in fact, if I could pick, I’d be a Nine!, because I’m so tired of my own intensity.) But I’ve seen more of the dark side of the Nine over the years: the inability to do anything with their lives. I think a lot of the guys at the jail are Nines, and a high percentage of the guys who I meet who are recovering alcoholics, who are NOT recovering alcoholics, I should say…

EM: Maybe they  just ran out of booze…

RR: (Laughter) …I think many of them are Nines, without putting all people who are in jail or all alcoholics into the Nine category by any means. I’m less optimistic about the Nine than I used to be. I’ve seen their ability to waste most of their life. They never do what they themselves want to do, and their inability to sustain relationships and to avoid relationships, to take initiative in relationships, can end up being very “self-destructive.” In my initial tapes, and I think in my book, too, I have the Nine almost like the Heilige [German for Saint]. I think the Germans even called the Nine the Saint because of my waxing poetry about how lovely Nines are. I think we’re all potentially Saints, not just the Nines. Those are two things that jump into my mind.

EM: A generic question: How did you begin to pursue the spiritual path? What events in your life inspired you to pursue this direction?

RR: I grew up in Kansas—my parents were Kansas wheat farmers. I didn’t grow up on the farm—they had moved to the city during the dust storms. As a boy, I just remembered having what we would now call “God experiences,” or religious experiences where God, and especially love, became very real. I’m sure that was helped by having two very loving parents. These experiences gave me a safe universe, and it was an affective experience, too. I think my early experiences of God were affective, heart experiences, where God was so real and so warm, that I could really imagine being celibate, or God being “enough.” It’s all here, what more would you want?! I’m not saying that feeling lasted!, but I had several of those experiences, and can see myself as a little boy standing in the back yard of my home, on summer nights, and just standing there in awe. So that was the beginning of it. From my earliest times, I wanted to be a priest and eventually a Franciscan. As a little Catholic boy, it was the only path I knew of that would keep God first and central.

When I was in the seminary in the ’60s, we had these young, wonderfully educated Franciscan friars who had been in Europe during Vatican II, and they gave us a marvelously broad, truly catholic (catholic with a little “c”) theology which made it easy to build on and put head and heart together.

EM: Were your parents religious?

RR: Normal, cultural Catholics, but I wouldn’t say overly pious or overly religious. Normally religious for their generation.

EM: How did they react to this interest of yours?

RR: Well, of course, being the Catholics of their generation, the thought that their son wanted to be a priest was something they were very proud of. It was only after ordination that my mother told me how hard it was to let go of me.

I left for the Seminary at the age of 14, which is the way we did it in the fifties. We’d never let someone go that young now. I’m sure it was to keep you from girls! Yet for me, it worked, and I’ve had to live my life backwards. After I was ordained a priest in 1970 and went out into public ministry working with people I had to go through the “falling in love” experiences, the suffering through that, and re-finding my ground. But it’s okay when you have clear boundaries to begin with. I always say it’s better to grow up conservative and then become more liberal, if you want to use those words. It doesn’t work well the other way around. So I’m rather happy for my conservative beginnings, because they gave me a container from which I could move out and pull things back into that integrated center. That’s what many young people don’t have today, as you well know.

EM: Is there a story or anecdote you could give us to illustrate your early religious experiences?

RR: It’s hard to communicate without trivializing or monumentalizing it. Seeing myself as a little boy, I must have been four, five or six, standing in my backyard just looking out, and everything being One, everything being good. Nature was tied up with it. I always say there are only three things that approach perfection, which we Ones look for all our lives: God is perfect, Love is perfect, and nature is perfect. I was probably feeling very secure in my parents’ love, undoubtedly; it’s a beautiful summer night and I was standing in the backyard alone, I’m so aware of the tree above me and the sky above me, and the grass beneath me, my mother’s flowers, and it’s perfect. So I had all three of thEM: I had the love of my parents, I had nature surrounding me, and in that context, God was believable, God was real, God was touchable, tangible It was both very sweet and very safe. You can’t pay enough for that!

EM: Was it as if you had unlimited memory and you knew time, you knew space, you knew the past and the future, all rolled into one, with no questions?

RR: That’s it. It’s a cosmic egg of safe meaning. It’s so spacious, so right, that there’s even room for problems and the dark side, for the other, or the sin, or the brokenness. “Everything belongs” has now become my motto. I think that’s what it means to be “saved” by God. It mainly has to do with this world.

EM: And this experience can’t be artificially produced.

RR: That’s what the Orthodox-Christian, Judeo-Christian tradition means by “grace.” Grace is simply given, and there is no way you can earn it, or become worthy of it, you just try to be ready for the moment when it’s apparent. It is always there and always free.                                

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Father Rohr’s enneagram books include: Discovering the Enneagram, Experiencing the Enneagram, and Enneagram II: Advancing Spiritual Discernment. His enneagram tapes include: The Enneagram: Naming Our Illusions, and Enneagram II: Tool of Conversion.

In addition, he has published many religious books, including Jesus’ Plan for a New World, The Great Themes of Scripture, Why Be Catholic?, The Wild Man’s Journey, Radical Grace, Job and the Mystery of Suffering, Simplicity, Quest for the Holy Grail, Grace in Action, Near Occasions of Grace, Varieties of Christian Prayer, Who Belongs to the Community, Diversity and Unity, and Understanding Violence. He is also a Contributing Editor for Sojourners magazine.            

*Read the latest interview with Father Richard Rohr in part 2 here.*

This article first first appeared in Enneagram Monthly Issued 32-33, October-November 1997. © Jack Labanauskas and Andrea Isaacs. Do not reprint or share without permission.