Resurrection Sunday

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Resurrection Sunday!

This is arguably the single most important event in history alongside the crucifixion. 

It is the pivot on which all of history turns and is at the foundations of the Christian faith that which is the hope of all who believe in Christ. It is the event that caused the followers of Jesus to review the life of Jesus, as in it, they started understanding the mystery that is Christ. Suddenly they saw the divinity that was hidden at the passion. This was the event that concluded 3 years of ministry with Jesus and without it, they would never have gone from doubting followers, to become the apostles of the church.

For us, this is the event that inaugurates our access into eternity, and the expectation is that we graft into our lives here on earth the resurrection life of Jesus.

So how do we live life with the risen Lord? We look for the signs of His life in ours. This can manifest in so many different ways, but I have found myself experiencing this life in the peace and the joy that is prevalent with walking with Him.

The resurrection is a joyous factual event that renders us restored and empowered. This resurrection life does not provide for us a means of escape the crisis of our age but rather it plunges us into the world to be salt and light.

Where our shortcomings hinder us from going into the world in obedience to the commandment of our Lord, we can find that the resurrection has shattered the cycles of depravity that we as humans find ourselves repeatedly falling into, and in that, we can find a hand of grace that is extended before we can even need it. This grace grants us access to ways of living that supersedes the shortcomings of man. It even nullifies the pain and corruptibility of our bodies and gives us access to an abundance of life that brings healing and restoration to all who experience this brokenness.

It is in the resurrection that we find that when God breathed life into Christ he breathed life into all mankind who would receive his breath, and when God made Christ body whole but leaving the signs of his sacrifice he granted all of humanity a way to become whole, indeed we can experience what the bible in 2 Corinthians 5:17 says “all things have passed away”

Ignatius of Loyola taught that the vocation of Christians is not action or contemplation but rather contemplation in action. As we contemplate the glory and the power of the resurrection we are required not to just ponder it but to walk it out every day. The resurrection of Jesus is not a concept but rather it is a way of living that invites us into a deeper relationship with his, one where we walk with him and reveal his glory through what we do and who we are. It is the power of the resurrection that calls us to “arise and shine” as the book of Isaiah chapter 60 says. We get to partake of his resurrection and reveal his glory throughout all the earth

We are living in such uncertain times. We live in a divided world, and our divided world has been shut down by the pandemic, but the resurrection life of Jesus draws us into something new. Gone are the days of the uncertainty, brokenness, violence, and pain of the passion, we now have the life of the saviour. This life is drawing us past the brokenness of the world and into His life.

The resurrection is a joy that overcomes all, it is the power of The Cross walked out. It is the victory of Christ over all human sorrows. It doesn’t mean we become numb to the pain in the world and forget about it, rather like christ presenting his wounds we are to remember it but walk in the greater truth of his life. We now, in the context of our world, follow Jesus deeper into the truth of His Kingdom. It is not something we can do on our own strength, but rather it is something that we must walk alongside Jesus. The combined human sorrow that was represented at Calvary is now in the past and the Joy of Jesus in the resurrection is now given. This is not a joy we deserve, but we should not become resistant to it, rather it is a joyous gift given to us based on God’s merit 

The reality of the resurrection isn’t as easy to grasp as The Passion. The passion is filled with pain and suffering and encompasses all of the human experience, there are detailed accounts written about it but the resurrection isn’t so clear, there are no descriptions of it happening, there are no eyewitnesses. There is simply the empty tomb.

The resurrection could have happened in a way that is more clear, more evident, with eyewitnesses to describe it in the gospels, in a glorious way that would have made it clear to all of Israel that he had risen, but it did not. It happened quietly. It is a unique but discreet event that is revealed to mankind through stories and whispers of an empty tomb. It is not seen, it is announced. 

The resurrection draws us out of the depravity of man, and into the abundance of His life.  This doesn’t mean the absence of a challenge, but it gives us peace and joy amid difficulty. 

Perhaps to recognise how Christ is at work in these times, we must first like Mary in the Garden learn to recognise his resurrected nature.

May his resurrecting grace abide in you as you abide in Christ.

- Israel Fouché

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PALM SUNDAY

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Today is the start of Holy Week and traditionally today is known as “Palm Sunday”. It is named after the palm branches that were laid on the road as Jesus entered Jerusalem on the back of a Donkey. The account of Jesus’ arrival in Jerusalem is an interesting one because of all the various motives portrayed in the passage, but in my view, the important message for us to grasp here is not of the expectation of those who greeted him (as we will explore below), but of God as Jesus pursuing His desire to dwell with man and abide in them as His temple.

The story starts with Jesus travelling to a place called Bethany to visit His friends Mary, Martha and Lazarus. Jesus was about to begin his journey that would lead to calvary. He chooses to visit Bethany one last time to be with those he considered his friends. The story starts with Jesus wanting to abide with those he calls his friends, and it is this motive that I believe is a message we can learn from in this season.

To understand what exactly was happening in this passage you need to understand the historical context in which the story takes place. Israel was under Roman occupation and governed by a group of leaders called the Sanhedrin. The people of Israel were looking to the coming of the Messiah which they believed to be a warrior king like David that would liberate them from Rome and restore the glory of Israel. The most important thing in the Israelite world was the temple built by King David’s son, Solomon, but many had believed that the glory of God had departed from the temple. They looked to a prophecy spoken by the prophet Ezekiel 5 centuries earlier that talked about the glory of God leaving the temple via the east of Jerusalem due to corruption in leadership and the temple: “The glory of the Lord went out from the threshold of the house (the temple) and stopped above the cherubim. The cherubim . . . rose from the earth in my sight as they went out . . . They stopped at the entrance of the east gate of the house of the Lord; and the glory of the God of Israel was above them” (Ezek. 10:18-19) From there the glory went and stopped over the mount of Olives. Later in the prophetic writings of Ezekiel, it talks of a time when the glory of God would return to the temple from the east and then the temple would be reconsecrated: “Then he brought me to the gate, the gate facing east. And there, the glory of the God of Israel was coming from the east; the sound was like the sound of mighty waters; and the earth shone with his glory” (Ez. 43:1-2). They looked to the coming of their Messiah, the rightful warrior King and the coming of the glory of God from the east of Jerusalem. 

There was a prophetic word the Israelites held onto during this time of waiting for their coming King and it was from Zechariah 9:9

Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion!

Shout aloud, O daughter of Jerusalem!

Behold, your king is coming to you;

righteous and having salvation is he,

humble and mounted on a donkey,on a colt,

the foal of a donkey.

From Bethany, Jesus and his disciples went to the mount of olives east of Jerusalem and told two of his disciples to “Go into the village in front of you, and immediately you will find a donkey tied and a colt with her. Untie them and bring them to me. If anyone says anything to you, you shall say, ‘The Lord needs them,’ and he will send them at once.”

With the proclamation of the Lord in need of a Donkey and riding into Jerusalem from the east, you can imagine the excitement of the people of Israel. They had heard about this Jesus of Nazareth who proclaims himself to be greater than the temple, fulfilling the prophecies, preaching the Kingdom of God and healing the sick, and here he comes riding on a colt from the east just as prophesied, coming into Jerusalem just like the Ark of the covenant (where the glory of God dwelt) with his disciples, just like king David, taking off their robes for Jesus to ride on. They shouted “Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! Blessed is the coming kingdom of our father David! Hosanna in the highest!”

The motive of the Warrior King and the one who comes to restore the temple might further be emphasised with the laying down of palm leaves. There is no clear evidence in the old testament for why they would do this. There are however two accounts of Palm leaves used by the Israelites in the writings of the Jewish Apocrypha in 1 and 2 Maccabees 

1 Maccabees 13:51

“… the Jews entered it (the citadel at Jerusalem) with praise and palm branches… because a great enemy had been crushed and removed from Israel.”

and then again in 2 Maccabees 10:7

“carrying ivy-wreathed wands and beautiful branches and also fronds of palm, they offered hymns of thanksgiving to him who had given success to the purifying of his own holy place (the temple).”

The only recorded use of palm in celebration for the Israelites was for liberating the Israelites in battle and cleansing the temple. It is possible that in laying down palm leaves as part of the celebration of welcoming Jesus into Jerusalem they were signifying that this was part of their prophetic expectation for what Jesus was there to do. 

Indeed their prophesied Messiah had come and he came as the glory of God from the east and went to the temple. The book of Mark records that Jesus entered the temple, looked around and returned to Bethany for the night, abiding with his friends again.

The next day Jesus returned to Jerusalem and again entered the temple, but this time he drove out all who sold and bought in the temple and “he overturned the tables of the money-changers and the seats of those who sold pigeons. He said to them, “It is written, My house shall be called a house of prayer,’ but you make it a den of robbers.”

Jesus had begun, as the returning glory of God, to cleanse his temple from the same thing that drove the glory away, corruption. Jesus then started to heal the sick and blind as a sign of the glory of God that was present. When the angry Jews asked him for a sign as to why he was doing this he answered: “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.”. Jesus was of course not talking about the physical temple as his desire was never to abide in a building of stone but to abide with his creation as His temple. Jesus was saying here that the rededication and restoration of the temple will not be one of stone but one of flesh. After this Jesus returned to Bethany and abided with his friends again.

Jesus came so that he can restore all that kept us from Abiding with Him. All throughout the ministry of Jesus he abided with people, he abided in Nazareth for 30 years, he abided with disciples, he abided in the houses of Pharisees and tax collectors and what He was doing was calling us back to the reality of the garden where mankind abided with God the Father. 

The very first words of Jesus recorded in the book of John are: ”what do you seek?”. The norm of the day was to look for a warrior King, a victory, a restored kingdom, and a rededicated temple. Jesus asked the disciples of John this question and instead of seeking what was the norm of their day, they asked His where they can abide with Him.

Israel sought a physical temple for God to dwell in, but Jesus sought to dwell in man. They expected a warrior King Like David, instead, they received a suffering servant riding on a donkey. They expected a messiah to liberate them from the oppression of Rome, instead, they got a saviour who liberated them from the principalities of darkness that was behind the oppression of man. They expected a war, instead, they got a servant who washed feet and died on a cross. They expected the restoration of the glory of Israel, instead, they got the restoration of the glory of God to all creation. Indeed the ways of God can seem upside down to man, so it also seems to the powers of darkness: 

“It is a glorious phrase of the New Testament, that ‘he led captivity captive.’ 

The very triumphs of His foes, it means, he used for their defeat. He compelled their dark achievements to sub-serve his end, not theirs.

They nailed him to the tree, not knowing that by that very act they were bringing the world to his feet. 

They gave him a cross, not guessing that he would make it a throne. 

They flung him outside the gates to die, not knowing that in that very moment they were lifting up all the gates of the universe, to let the King of Glory come in.

They thought to root out his doctrines, not understanding that they were implanting imperishably in the hearts of men the very name they intended to destroy.

They thought they had defeated God with His back to the wall, pinned and helpless and defeated: they did not know that it was God Himself who had tracked them down.

He did not conquer in spite of the dark mystery of evil. He conquered through it.”

James Stewart (1896–1990) 

Palm Sunday declares Jesus as King riding into Jerusalem, the coming of the prince of peace, the coming of the glory of God, The son of David come to claim the throne, and the restoration of his true temple, it just looked different.

This holy week, are we welcoming Jesus as king into our hearts? Will we be that place of abiding? Are we ready to receive him, even if it looks different from our expectation? As the king comes, are we receiving his with shouts of Hosannah?

Have a blessed Holy Week and abide with Christ as we journey with Him to Calvary

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Israel Fouché

follow him on Instagram @israelfouche

Lent, are you missing the point?

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Growing up in a reformed culture meant that Lent wasn’t a very common practice. I didn’t even hear about it until I was 18 and moved to the United States from South Africa where I was first introduced to the spiritual practice (and sometimes hypocrisy) of Lent. 

So, what is Lent? 

Lent is a spiritual observance of the historic Christian liturgical calendar that dates back to at least the 3rd century. It is a period of fasting for 40 days (Excluding Sundays) starting on Ash Wednesday and ending on Maundy Thursday (The day which is historically celebrated as the night of the last supper). It serves as a period of penitential practices to help us prepare to celebrate Holy Week, the week of and leading up to the crucifixion when the Church recalls the suffering and death of Jesus and celebrates His glorious resurrection from the dead.

The 40 days of Lent is also the period in which we meditate on the 40 days of Jesus in the wilderness. By observing these 40 days we enable ourselves to grasp at the revelation that in the birth of Christ, he did not merely accept human nature, but that God in Christ accepted for himself the depravity, suffering and death of what it means to be human.

Lent enables us to let go of the routine of our religion and enable ourselves to cease superficiality and start becoming attentive and reflective to the importance of the incarnation, suffering, death, and resurrection of our Lord.

It enables us to grasp the extraordinary way in which God has pursued us as His children. 

In 2018 I spent a week at Mucknell Abbey in Worcestershire, England alongside two of my brothers from the Community of St Anselm. We arrived at the beautiful Benedictine monastery and were soon greeted by Br Patrick, was shown to our rooms, given a copy of the Rule of St Benedict and a schedule for how our days would look. We were told to settle in and join for the next office of prayer. Br Tonderai, Demarius and I looked at the schedule and saw that next on the schedule was “None” and thought that since we didn’t have anything scheduled until lunch we will just hang out for a bit. It wasn’t until a very displeased Br Patrick showed up before lunch and asked why we didn’t show up for “None” that we realised “None” is pronounced “Noon” and is an office of prayer we were supposed to be at as guests of the community. We also learned that “None” is where we get our word for “Noon” (12 pm) and comes from the Lenten tradition of fasting until the 9th hour of the day (3 pm) which is the hour believed when Christ died. “None” kept being moved back until for a large part of the church “None” was celebrated at 12 pm and culturally it became the norm to call 12 pm “Noon”. With strange historic practices such as fasting all food until “None”, what are the traditional expressions of Lent? 

Lent is quite simple, it is expressed as prayer, fasting, and almsgiving.

Following lent isn’t some Neo-gnostic idea of denying the physical as something bad and picking up something spiritual which is good as is the majority of the cases with modern fasting. Rather, lent is about turning our attention to God. It is about not allowing things and preoccupations to become rivals to our communion with God and it’s about making prayer and communion with God a priority in place of what we have chosen to fast. Like prayer and fasting, almsgiving is an important part of the celebration of Lent. This almsgiving isn’t about throwing money at your favourite charity out of religious obedience, but rather it is about being intentional about mercy.

Be intentional during this season on how the Spirit is nudging your heart to show mercy, compassion and grace. 

It was when I first got exposed to lent, living on campus at a Christian university in California, that I saw the great unintentional hypocrisy with which people follow lent. I would see people give us texting friends for emailing them, ice cream for doughnuts, and TV for youtube. I would see good-hearted Christians give up carbs for lent because they felt compelled to give something up and carbs were great because that meant they were summer body ready for spring break which followed lent. I even saw while living in the monastic tradition as a member of the Community of St Anselm one of my brothers give up salt on his food and replaced it with copious amounts of cheese that were high in salt to make his food saltier. It is not about giving up something for the sake of giving up something, it is about being intentional about communion with God and that sometimes requires a sacrifice. 

Is your Lenten sacrifice enabling you to better grasp Jesus’ journey to the cross and sacrifice? No? Then you are probably doing it wrong or you are misunderstanding what it is about.

Let’s be honest, giving up chocolate or cutting out carbs is a diet, let’s not pretend we are doing it for Jesus. There are however exceptions to this if dessert is an idol in your life and hinders a deeper connection with God then give it up, if not let’s not turn a 40-day dietary restriction into lent. If you end your lent season and find your spiritual life is in the same place then that’s a good indication that you gave up the wrong thing. 

Lent should be reflective of Jesus’ 40 days in the wilderness. He spent that time in solitude, prayer and reflection. It was only at the end of his 40 days that the devil came and tempted him. Jesus is recorded to have left the wilderness in the power of the Holy Spirit. Likewise, our lenten practices should enable us to leave our lent seasons in the power of the Holy Spirit.

I’m not saying you need to go sit in the wilderness in isolation somewhere for 40 days to be faithful to a lenten experience, you just simply need to give up the right thing.

In chapter 49 of the Rule of St Benedict that I was given at Mucknell Abbey, St Benedict says this:

“During these days, therefore, we shall add to the usual measure of our service something by way of private prayer and abstinence from food and drink, so that each of us will have something over and above our normal obligations to offer to God of our own will “with the Joy of the Holy Spirit” (1 Thes 1:6)… and look forward to the Holy Feast of Easter with the joy of spiritual longing”

“Add to the usual” and “Abstinence”, this 5th-century wisdom from a distant saint gives us good instruction on what to do.

Give up what distracts you from God. Lent mirrors Jesus’ sacrifice and time of prayer. Did removing whatever you fasted make it easier for you to connect to God?

Despite Chocolate being the 3rd most popular thing Christians gave up in 2019 after social media and alcohol (according to openbible.info), it doesn’t fit the description for Lent. 

The most popular, social media, is a very good thing to give up; it takes a lot of our time and can be such a temptation to envy the lives of other people that we forget about all the wonderful things God does in our own life. Giving this up and rather focusing on God in your life will surely bring you closer.

Lent should enable you to experience the anguish of the Crucifixion, the mystery of Holy Saturday and the glory of Christ’s resurrection whose life now flows in us. 

You don’t even have to give up something to be able to be strengthened spiritually, or maybe you need to add something, maybe you need to spend extra time in the morning actually praying or reading a chapter in the bible. One of the practices I have found helpful during lent is waking up and spending time praying the “Our Father” because it reflects Jesus’ temptation.

Jesus was tempted with his identity (Sonship), food (bodily desires), and glory + power. The “Our Father” takes our eyes off ourselves and places them on God:

• “Our Father”: it turns our attention. away from ourselves and onto God as our father (Identity).

• “hallowed be your name”: our names don’t deserve glory, only God’s does.

• “your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as in heaven”: God is king, all power is his and I desire not my own will, but only God’s will.

• “give us this day our daily bread”: I am dependent on God, I do not desire anything of the flesh, but I desire God who I can trust to fulfil all my needs.

• “forgive us our debts”: Without God’s mercy, we are nothing.

• “lead us not into temptation”: lead me not into that which will take my eyes off God.

• “but deliver us from evil”: God is my deliverer and will deliver me from those same distractions.

The important thing about this spiritual practice is to turn our self-centredness into God-centredness. Let’s keep it about God this lent and try not to make it about ourselves. How about we try and not (as seems to become a norm in the evangelical) post a selfie this lent with #MakeHisNameFamous because let’s be honest, you taking a selfie to brag about what you are up to, where you are and what you are wearing is not “Making his name famous”, neither is the numbers of likes you get. 

Perhaps the best lenten practice you can follow is to simply take time to pray the “Our Father”, but don’t just say it religiously, pray it, meditate on the words and allow it to become a revelation to you.

James 4:8 “Draw near to God, and He will draw near to you”

Israel Fouché 

follow him on Instagram @israelfouche

Should Christians use the Enneagram?

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Ever find yourself procrastinating work by doing a “What cheese am I” test on BuzzFeed? Or is that just me? The truth is, who nowadays hasn’t done a BuzzFeed quiz to find out what “FRIENDS” character they are, or what Disney prince or princess they would be, or what Harry Potter house you would be in only to discover that the explanations at the bottom of the result completely matches you? This occurrence is called the “Barnum Effect” and partially explains why we resonate so much with these tests. I recently did a “which onion are you?” quiz and honestly, the answer was moving (I got shallots FYI). This, although fun, is nothing serious but these types of tests are everywhere and jokes aside people take Personality tests very seriously. While studying in California, as part of my studies I had to do the DISC test, and among friends, back in 2014, the Meyers-Briggs test was all the rave.

Massive corporations have started doing these tests with employees to help with team dynamics and to up productivity. To a lot of individuals outside of the Christian tradition, there is a longing to understand why they exist and what their purpose is and the hope is that if they can understand themselves, then perhaps they can figure this out. For “believers” within this tradition, the appeal is to better understand the gifts God has given them and to better understand their “created uniqueness”, some see it as an affirmation of how beautifully complex the creation of mankind is. 

Personality tests, sometimes, however rather becomes permission to be their worst self. People through these tests find out what their weaknesses are and rather than seeing that as an opportunity to change (through prayer and the guidance of the Spirit), they express it as permission to be that very weakness. God calls us unto holiness, not to a place of self-actualisation through self-knowledge. 

These personally tests however aren’t new, or rather the desire to better understand oneself through these tests aren’t new. Astrology, for instance, was satisfying this need for a long time, then there was an attempt to take the religious aspect out of it and approach astrology from a phycological angle through Astropsychology. The occult world has been doing this for a long time, and one of these methodologies have crept into the Evangelical church and is deceiving many. 

The Truth about the Enneagram

The Enneagram is an absolute “pet peeve” of mine. It is what I have called the “Millennial’s Astrology” and I have a good reason to call it this. It is everywhere and even major evangelical leaders have publicly endorsed it, including some of my pastors who I walked closely within California.

They all have the same reason for why they do the Enneagram and insists that it is nothing more than a personality test to aid them in their walk with God, and to the few that actually read books all resound Richard Rohr’s claim that it goes back to the “desert Fathers” (whom none of them ever know who they actually were), but the truth just is that it doesn’t.

Some say that there is so much debate around where it comes from that it doesn’t matter and remains a helpful tool, but this argument for the contested origins come from the very same people who are trying to sell books to the evangelicals in the first place. We know where it comes from. 

It was first introduced to the Catholic community around the 1970s through people like Robert Ochs who taught it at the Jesuit School of Theology in Chicago. Ochs learnt it from Claudio Naranjo at the Esalen Institute which existed to teach alternative education through the merging of western and eastern philosophy. It was at Esalen where Noranjo took the Enneagram teachings of Oscar Ichazo and merged them with western psychology. Noranjo was taught the Enneagram by Ichazo when he visited Santiago, Chile with a group of around 50 people wanting to learn these practices.

Ichazo was an occultist who practised esoteric spirituality and also practised Zen, Sufism, the Kabbalah and the teachings of Georges I. Gurdjieff (the Father of the Enneagram). Ichazo spent years in the East studying the higher yogas, Buddhism, Confucianism, alchemy, and I Ching and after himself spending a reported 7 days in a state of ecstasy decided to start a school to teach what he had learnt and established the “Arica institute” where Noranjo studied the Enneagram.

Ichazo taught that every person is born a pure “essence” but between the age of 4 and 6 choose one of 9 personalities (the enneagram). He taught that to return to one's essence you have to act opposite to your personality’s ego through special practices such as meditation or the Buddhist Mudras. Ichazo claimed to have been taught the connection between personality and the Enneagram while in a trance under the influence of Archangel Gabriel, the “Green Qu’Tub Spirit” or Metatron. Some of the training at the Arica institute was to prepare you to connect to your “Green Qu’Tub Spirit” (Sufi mystical term for spiritual master). 

And this brings us to Georges I. Gurdjieff someone who Ichazo studied thoroughly. Gurdjieff was an Armenian who was fascinated by various supernatural phenomena such as communicating the dead, magic, fortune-telling, and secret societies possessing great knowledge. According to Gurdjieff, his studies took him to Central Asia, Tibet, India, Egypt, Uzbekistan, Mecca and Medina. He also claimed that he was allowed into a monastery of a secret society that dates back to ancient Babylon, the “Sarmoung Brotherhood” and this is where he learnt his esoteric knowledge.

Gurdjieff was the first to teach the Enneagram as part of his occult teaching and reportedly taught “All knowledge can be included in the enneagram and with the help of the enneagram it can be interpreted. And in this connection only what a man can put into the enneagram does he actually know, that is, understand. What he cannot put into the enneagram makes books and libraries entirely unnecessary. Everything can be included and read in the enneagram.”. So the Enneagram was taught as this sacred spiritual tool to your true self, or your true essence. 

We can see from the above that there is absolutely no basis for the Enneagram being rooted in Christianity and in fact, it is completely rooted in the occult mystical practices, we know this because the earliest mention of the word Enneagram is in the writings of the Russian occultist P. D. Ouspensky who attributes it to his teacher, Gurdjieff. The modern Enneagram that is practised is thus the version of it that comes from Oscar Ichazo and if there are any doubts about his occult practices you can read his own words here.

I refer to the Enneagram as the Millennial’s Astrology because it functions precisely the same way. You are either born a certain star sign or you are a specific Enneagram archetype and depending on which you are, determines certain personality traits that are somehow rooted in a cosmic nature. Certain star signs don’t get along with other star signs and perhaps is best not to marry them, I have heard people very into the Enneagram utilise the same language: “This guy asked me out but he is a type 8 personality and I am a type 4, and we know they don’t get along” and in fact, there exists a version of the enneagram that connects Astrology called Enneastrology. But the occult usage of the Enneagram doesn’t end there. The Enneagram is partnered with various occult practices and beliefs such as Metatron’s cube (the same Metatron who supposedly taught Ichazo the Enneagram), sacred geometry, the “flower of life”, Neo-gnosticism, the Kabbalah, divination and numerology. 

Some of the more alarming Enneagram practices I have seen in the Christian communities are the Enneagram’s teaching on sin. It teaches that sin is a character limitation of your personality type and the remedy for it is to follow the teachings of your Enneagram. In a sort of Evangelical Gnosticism, sin becomes a matter of greater knowledge, instead of reforming our will. Instead of confession and repentance, it becomes the teachings of the Enneagram that deals with the sin in our lives.

The Enneagram is and always has been a mixture of esoteric “wisdom” and various eastern mysticism so when it gets packaged as a Christian tool the lines between the occult and orthodoxy gets blurred. 

Now I have heard very good-willed Christians tell me that it all doesn’t matter because they are able to incorporate the Enneagram into their faith well as it has been Christianised, but the problem lies in that there are also people who have Christianised Astrology and good-willed Christians who practice witchcraft but we certainly aren’t condoning those practices, why should we with the Enneagram? Much like Astrology which has been known to open doors to demonic oppression, I have come to learn of people who have needed to go through deliverance themselves and during the deliverance discovered the Enneagram to be the open door that caused it. When the enemy tries to corrupt Christians it is usually with something small, something you are willing to compromise on, but after a while, you start noticing that something just isn’t the same, you aren’t as passionate as you used to be, you aren’t praying as you used to or perhaps you have started to question aspects of your faith you would never have. The corruption of the saints always starts with something small (Ss 2:15). as Screwtape writes to Wormwood in C.S. Lewis’s “Screwtape Letters”:

“Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one- the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts...” 

So Should Christians use it?

Something which functions more like an Evangelical Gnosticism that was given by something that sounds like a demon is probably something to stay away from, no matter how useful, but in the incredible freedom we have, you will have to follow your convictions. Just know that like sacrificial meat, if it causes your brothers to stumble or to start delving deeper into the New Age beliefs it’s probably best to abandon (Romans 14:14-23). If the Enneagram was indeed just a test I might have left it to disappear over time as all the other tests have, but the Enneagram doesn’t claim to be that, it claims to be a blueprint to your true self, it claims to be spirituality.

1 Corinthians 2:15 “The spiritual person judges/discerns all things”

So what should be the Christian perspective on our identity and its formation?

Its a lot harder than the Enneagram because it's not methodological, and the reason there isn’t a method is because it's supposed to come from a place of relationship with God. There is no method, there is faith in Jesus. Our identity and personalities are revealed, understood and shaped as we walk with the indwelling Spirit and our hearts of stone gets turned into hearts of flesh (Ezekiel 36:26). In light of faith, where do we find identity?

We can only understand ourselves from the perspective of who we are in contexts of God. Creator - Created/ Father-Son. This is both our anthropological starting point and the beginning of our interaction with God. In the prayer of Jesus, it starts with “Our Father in heaven” so that our spirits can both look up and engage with the divine from the perspective that we are sons and daughters in light of God being a father.

In Exodus 3:11 Moses asks God who is he, what his worth is and in response to that questions, God responds that He is with him.

In Genesis 39:2 Joseph is at the slave market and gets called a successful man because God was with him.

Our worth and identity come not from the perception of others or the perception of self. It comes from the fact that God is with us.

This God is with us or worded differently God is in relationship with us is where we start to gather our identity from. It was St Thomas Aquinas who defined the trinity as Subsistent relationship. God as Trinity is based on whom the 3 persons of the trinity are respectively in relation to one another. St Augustine put it this way: "They [the three divine persons] are each in each and all in each, and each in all and all in all, and all are one”. Likewise, we have been called into this relationship with the trinity as Christ now hosts humanity in his Hypostatic union and we host the Holy Spirit inside ourselves. Therefore as the Sons and Daughters of God, our identity is no longer drawn based on that which we have assumed onto ourselves but to better understand ourselves we are to look at what has been given to us concerning this “perichoresis” as the Church fathers called it.

"The crucial point, in a word, is that the relation to God, and to others in God, that establishes the individual substance in being is generous. The relation itself makes and lets me in my substantial being be. This “letting be” implies a kind of primordial, ontological “circumincession,” or “perichoresis,” of giving and receiving between the other and myself. What I am in my original constitution as a person has always already been given to me by God and received by me in and as my response to God’s gift to me of myself “― David L. Schindler.

This ontology of who we are concerning God is important in light of all the different things that contribute to our assumed identity in the modern world. I believe there to be 5 approaches to identity that I think is worth looking at:

1. God: who we are concerning God

2. Universal: the aspects that apply to everyone's identity such as gender (although in neoliberalism this is being challenged).

3. Individual: “Self-Expression” “I am who I say I am.”

4. Malleable: that which is shaped by our environment and culture. The shaping within Christian culture has been called Liturgical formation.

5. Fluidity: our assumed identity changes over time, the extreme end of this is in neoliberalism’s perspective that gender is fluid and can change daily if needed.

There is a Cistercian saying I heard that says: “The Soul isn’t in any one part, but in the whole” and while this ontology of subsistent relationship doesn’t explain the human condition as a whole, it is, however, a Spiritual path to a greater understanding of ourselves in contrast to the spiritual path the Enneagram provides.

This mystical ontology begins not with “who am I”, but begins with “who are you, Lord”. It is the divine alterity that is absolute and our human identity that is dependant on it. In the first paragraph of John Calvin’s “Institutes,” he says this:

“Nearly all the wisdom we possess, that is to say, true and sound wisdom, consists of two parts: the knowledge of God and ourselves… no one can look upon himself without immediately turning his thoughts to the contemplation of God, in whom he “lives and moves”… Again, it is certain that man never achieves a clear knowledge of himself unless he first looked upon God’s face, and then descends from contemplating him to scrutinise himself”.

To understand yourself as a Christian you have to embrace a counter-cultural non-humanistic narrative that is found throughout the new testament, you need to die to yourself. You cannot understand yourself or should I say understand your identity without losing it in who God is. 

John 3:30 says it this way:” He must increase, but I must decrease”.

It seems that as our autonomy decreases in light of God, our “self” increases as we fully grasp who we are concerning God. The same can be said the other way. As we become absolute in our life, our sense of ‘self’ decreases. That's why in the modern-day ‘selfie culture’ the more our humanism increases the more there seems to be a lack of identity and it is this unstable foundation of “self” that is leading to so much of the degradation of society. “Those who lose their life for my sake will find it” (Matt 16:25).

In contrast to the Enneagram as a path to your true essence, you can understand this view as relational essentialism in which my ontology or my “who I am” is an expression of my deepest relation and who I become is the end product of what I place in a position of importance in my life. The Christian view would be that I am who I am in light of God and what He created me to be, and what I will become needs to be shaped by the guidance of the Spirit and His word, thus God is both my prime relation and my prime significance. 

It is this path of relationship that is our path to our true selves. Our Method is relationship and our goal is union with God. The incredible thing about this is that from the moment you grasp who you are in God you find yourself transcending your subjective self to be empowered to walk as Christ walked and to announce His kingdom is at hand. The shame is that for so many Christians their “personality” has become their excuse to ignore the great commission. There are so many things Millennials have found their identity in rather than God, it’s one thing to have something be a part of who you are, but don’t make it your whole.

These tests can be helpful, however, they are not supposed to shape your identity, it is merely there to help you understand yourself and that understanding changes over time.

We worship a God who has intimately known us since he formed us in our mother's wombs, he knows every hair on our heads and he knows exactly who you will become. Walk with Him, live life in union with Him. That is who you are. The beloved of God.

If you are interested in reading more on Christian new age I recommend the Pontifical Council’s report on it titled “Jesus Christ the Bearer of the water of life”

and if you were interested in finding out which onion you are, you can do so here

Come, Holy Spirit

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It is Pentecost Sunday! Today is the day when we look back with the church universal to the incredible gift of the Holy Spirit that was given to us and to the start of what came to be known as the church; the family in which we all find belonging, in all its great diversity and expressions. This is a family which we receive when we are born again and get to join in on the heavenly celebration, the same celebration that started with 120 people in an upper room, grew to 3000 people joining and now billions of people later we are still celebrating.  

Pentecost nowadays can be so misunderstood. For some, it reminds them of certain denominations, church expressions, loud music and ecstatic glossolalia. These can have a connotation to Pentecostal churches but it is not what Pentecost is about. Pentecost is a pivotal moment in mankind’s history with its creator. It is the moment which we received the creator Spirit in whom alone we can say Jesus is Lord (1 Corinthians 12:3). There has not been a more important moment in the history of our faith since then. It is that which enables us to be Christian, who makes us into His new creation and share this life with the world. 

The Holy Spirit in both Hebrew and Greek is translated as the Holy- Wind/ breath/ Spirit and in looking at these definitions we can perhaps better understand the Spirit's work in our lives.

The Spirit as wind shows us how He works. It can be gentle and it can be fierce. It brings us into His intimacy and allows us to communicate that love to the world. There is a 2nd-century Christian text from the Odes of Solomon that says that the human soul is like a harp that sounds as the wind passes through it:

“as the wind passes through the lyre

and the strings speak

in the same way through my inward being

sounds the spirit of the lord, and I speak in his love”

As the Spirit is at work deep in our souls it is that work which enables us to communicate this Love of God to the world and where the church has miscommunicated this love is where it has not allowed this Spirit to deeply work in it.

Wind cannot be bottled and distributed as needed. Wind bottled is no longer wind. Wind is unpredictable, it does what it wants and moves where it wills and because of that, we cannot trammel the holy spirit with rationalism or with our ecclesiology and institutions. 

The Spirit as breath reminds us of the life that God gives us through the spirit. If you look at the global church it is clear that some parts of the church are suffocating. The only way to stop suffocating is to breathe. The Spirit is the breath given to the church and the church needs to start breathing.

Ezekiel chapter 37 brings together the 3 images of breath, wind and spirit and I believe carries an important passage for the church.

In it, Ezekiel is taken to a valley filled with dry bones. The Lord tells him to prophesy over the bones and as he does the bones come together and forms a body but the body has "no breath in them". Then he is told to prophesy to the wind and says “Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe on these slain, that they may live” and “breath came into them, and they lived” and they stand up as an “exceedingly great army” 

Verse 11 says “Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost”. We are these dry bones as the church and we need the Spirit to come revitalise the church to live and be an “exceedingly great army” for the glory of God, shouting His love to the world. In verse 14 the Lord speaks this to us: “ I will put my Spirit within you, and you shall live”

Ezekiel prays “come, Breath” or “Come, Holy Spirit.” This is the first and only prayer to the holy spirit recorded in scripture. This is the “Maranatha” of the Holy Spirit. 

Maranatha like this prayer is found only once in the Bible (1 Corinthians 16:22) and can be translated as “Our Lord, come” but also as “Our Lord has come” in this we find that same tension of knowing the “Holy Spirit has come” and still praying “come, Holy Spirit” so that the Spirit may come and fill us anew and breathe life into our churches and various institutions, so that we might live and better communicate the love of the father to the world.

So let's pray in this season alongside the church universal one of the oldest prayers in the church, the original epiclesis.

Veni Sancte Spiritus!

Come Holy Spirit!

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PEACE HAS COME

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Isaiah 9:6

For to us a child is born,

to us a son is given;

and the government shall be upon his shoulder,

and his name shall be called

Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,

Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.

The Prince of Peace, Peace has come.

This past week leading up to Christmas I have been reflecting on a lady that I led to the Lord while visiting St George’s Cathedral in Cape Town, South Africa.

As I was kneeling in the front of the Cathedral to pray a lady came and stood next to me, looked at me and then proceeded to get on her knees. I could sense that she wasn’t used to praying but I was not ready for the beautiful encounter with Jesus that would follow. I turned to her and immediately became so overcome with Love from the father for her that I felt deeply moved with emotion. In the midst of this stirring of love I felt the Holy Spirit show me insight into what is going on in her life, the abusive relationship she just got out of after her divorce, the pain she is experiencing as both her mother and sister is dying from Cancer, the deep heaviness that she is carrying alongside thoughts of suicide and a sense of needing to go on for the sake of her little daughter. I then felt the Spirit say that he wants to lead her into His “unforced rhythms of Grace”.

Completely shocked at what I was experiencing I proceeded to tell her all about how Jesus loves her, how He sees her, how He knows what she is going through and then told her all that I was shown. As I am sharing this she started crying, the burden of the suffering was heavy on her. I got out my phone and read Matthew 11 from the Message to her and told her all about what Jesus did on the cross and that he wants to take this heaviness off her and give her a peace from which she will find freedom. After a moment of her just crying she looked up at me with this wonder in her eye and said: “I want to know this Jesus that cares for me so well”. I proceeded to lead her into a prayer of forgiveness and asked the Holy Spirit to come and breathe new life into her and for Jesus to come and lift this burden off her. Immediately her countenance changed, she looked happier, she was breathing deeply and said: “what is this lightness I am feeling, what is this peace inside of me”. Such a beautiful encounter with the Prince of Peace. A lady from Australia, having never set foot in a church wakes up that morning with a sense of urgency that she needs to find a church, gets into a taxi and the taxi drives her to the Cathedral where she walks in and sees me kneeling and in front of the altar, decided to just imitate what she sees me doing and sitting on the steps in front of the altar she encounters and received the greatest gift you could ever receive, the Prince of Peace.

How beautiful is this gift we get to celebrate this Christmas? The Birth the Jesus, God coming into man, not just knowing man and our suffering from afar, but assuming our humanity he took onto himself all the hardships of humanity by becoming a baby. The creator, vulnerable and dependant on His Creation. Man touching God. It was the birth of this baby, the manifestation of a peace which destroys chaos, that aligned man back with God and declared to all that is not as it should be in creation that its restoration is afoot. This baby, the perfect expression of Gods love.

This Christmas I pray that you are inspired by the message of Jesus, a message of Good Hope to the divorcee, to the suicidal, the addicted, to the outcast, to the marginalised, to the abused and even for those for whom it would seem like all is well in the world. Jesus came for everyone.

Merry Christmas

PEACE HAS COME

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We need to understand this.

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What is one word that can conjure up a deep feeling of longing and simultaneously feelings of dread? A word that encompasses a unifying ideal yet the very thing that we often find ourselves feeling indifferent about. 

It is a buzzword that seems to be thrown around way too often and is everywhere nowadays. Community.

From your local community, your church community, to your “Facebook community”.  At the time I am writing this I am even a member of a religious community on retreat at a Benedictine monastery, another religious community. It is something I can’t seem to run away from as a Christian nowadays.

Community is more than just a buzzword. It is in a very real way a unifying ideal that, no matter what you believe about it, you know you need. 

The world we live in is getting more and more connected, yet people are feeling more lonely than ever. Being lonely is a major issue our society is facing. Some studies have shown that loneliness increases mortality risk by 26% putting it on par with obesity and substance abuse. 

We know what we are longing for, yet why is this very thing that is spoken about and idolised so much the very thing as a society we are struggling to deal with. 

From my own experience, I have found that in the past I wanted my ideal of community without the process required to attain it. Community takes work. It takes intentionality. It’s a slow process, but the problem is that slow isn’t really that popular these days. In a world of Online shopping same-day delivery, instant messaging and fast food; slow seems outdated. It is our communal laziness and failure to see the value of community that stops us from genuinely pursuing it. Sometimes though our apathy towards it isn’t laziness but a genuine pain we experience from past hurts. And instead of opening up to others to allow healing, we isolate ourselves in an attempt to fight off this vain ideal and we formulate our own alternative communal models yet we never pursue them.

In a world that is telling you to be self-focused, the idea of pursuing something that requires you to turn to other people and become “other-centred” seems foreign and out of place. Being other-centred isn’t easy. It takes mindfulness and can only come from a genuine overflow of the heart. 

It requires you to show up. It requires you to commit to other people and sometimes it means rearranging your life. Community gives you the responsibility to look outwards. But at the end of the day, you find something that is worth paying a price for.

Community is where we are challenged to be more like Jesus. It’s easy to be the most patient, loving and selfless person when you have only yourself to deal with, however, it is within a community that you are refined as a follower of Christ.

the Book of Hebrews has this to say about it:

“And let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near.”

It is a command from our Lord to love one another, but sometimes we can swing so far towards other-mindedness that we lose sight that the same command for me to love another is the command for me to be loved by another. Community is the place where this happens. 

Community is an ideal, yes, but we cannot allow it to become such an ideal that our dream of the destination cripples us with fear to embark on the very journey that leads to that destination.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote, “The person who loves their dream of community will destroy community, but the person who loves those around them will create community.”

The intentionality that is needed to form good community might take some perseverance, but not nearly as much perseverance as waiting and hoping for our ideals to show up at our front door alongside our same day deliveries.

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