The first 6:30 minutes of this video are where Rohr explains what I was trying to get at with the origin story. It’s much clearer to just listen, but I pasted the transcript of those 6 minutes below, and at least partially cleaned it up, though a lot of sentences run together with no punctuation, and I only cleaned up and put in some sentence and paragraph breaks to help a little. But didn’t polish it all up. If you want to skip to the more relevant parts, I bolded them. All the rest of the words below are Rohr’s (or what the AI-generated transcript caught - and I only partially cleaned).
Well, I haven’t taught this I don’t think fully for probably 12 years so I hope I can say something fresh and refreshing but I’m eager to teach it and the amazing thing to me is that as many years as i’ve known it now I learned it in the by accident or providence I don’t know already in the early 70s I ended up being one of the first people to learn it for some reason and here 30 years later my appreciation for it would actually be stronger.
I’m more convinced there’s some amazing truth at work here and of course psychologists and therapists and scientists have all been putting out books you see many of them over here trying to say how can this be true; how can it be so true because scientifically we can’t prove it it really is a classic example of a wisdom tradition an oral tradition that seems to have been lost for many years.
In the book the christian perspective I’m trying to trace some of the history again and I’m convinced it has originally christian foundations among the desert fathers and then a Franciscan connection in the in the 12th 13th century by a man called Raymond Lull who was a master evangelist made eight trips to the world that we would now think of as the Muslim world and he was trying to find a lingua franca whereby as an evangelist he could talk to the muslim world and he could talk to the christian world and would not offend either one of them all right an almost neutral language of conversion or transformation he got lost in his huge set almost as great as Thomas Aquinas’s in latin and really wasn’t known and then got rediscovered.
Those good Jesuits brought it back to the the west in the early 70s and I happen to have a Jesuit spiritual director at that time in Cincinnati who taught it to me and in those first years we were told we had to keep it an absolute secret it was only because they didn’t want it to be trivialized. It was only to be taught from spiritual director to spiritual director because they thought that once it became as it has become a parlor game its power would be lost and now the books pour out they speak of the enneagram industry but I didn’t even tape it even though my friends say I don’t have an untaped thought and yet Helen Palmer came out with her book in the early 80s or mid 80s I think it was and I said okay the secret’s out and so the next time I taught it also in the mid 80s that was put on tape and that’s the set that made me known in these circles. It’s interesting that, and I say this just to help you understand the longing of the world I hope it doesn’t sound like I’m bragging or something but I keep being invited to give the keynote address or a major address at these international enneagram conventions, and i’ve only accepted it twice but I have to give them a polite excuse every other year or so, and I said to one of them I said why do you keep inviting me because I’ve said whatever I have to say; (I do think I sort of know it intuitively at this point but it amazed me that because it has moved into the business world it’s moved into the education world it’s moved all over the world. In fact my book tends to be much bigger selling in other languages than than in english) but, I asked why do you want me to talk about it and the answer is always the same. That even these people who have taken it to rather wonderful but secular levels are recognizing that it’s lost much of its power and that their desire why they keep inviting me back is they say bring us back to the spiritual foundation. Now that’s the tack I’m going to be giving you today which I believe is the original one and I believe is the authentic approach to the enneagram. It was a spiritual tradition totally, entirely. The years of refinements seem to have been done in the world that we would now call Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran where the sufi schools of spiritual direction took what I believe was the original capital sins of the desert fathers and refined them and made them subtle and helped to understand the patterns between them. Then Raymond Lull, in my opinion (I can’t prove all of this but it’s the only links in the chain we can rediscover) seems to have brought it back from the middle east and the Sufi schools of spiritual direction to the christian west, but then it got lost in his Latin text and no one bothered with it. But anyway we’ve got it again and it’s I hope I hope will be a gift for you and you see the title that I gave at this time is I believe a return to its original understanding and even a biblical understanding the enneagram as the discernment of spirits now let me spend a little time on that that word itself might be one not totally familiar to you in the 12th chapter of first Corinthians Paul speaks of discernment as one of the charismata one of the original charisms that are absolutely essential for this mystery called church…