- Home
- Preface
- Introduction
- Three Zones and Nine Sectors
- Three resources *
- Meeting the world
- Nine strategies *
- Nine types
- Gut types
- EIGHT *
- NINE *
- ONE *
- Gut types review
- Corruption and redemption
- Heart types
- TWO *
- THREE *
- FOUR *
- Heart types review
- Symmetry of the board
- Head types
- FIVE *
- SIX *
- SEVEN *
- Head types review
- All nine sectors
- Discerning home base part 1
- Gifts and temptations
- Developing all three resources
- Taking the advice of the opposites
- The path to redemption part 1
- Celebrating all of who we are
- Neurology
- Wings and Moves and other functions
- Biblical Journeys
- Prayer
- The Enneagram
- From the Enneagram to the Strategy Board
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Celebrating all of who we are
For most of the two thousand years of Church history, and for years before that in Rome and in Greece and beyond, written and taught philosophy and theology have been largely the preserve of the head types. As a consequence, much that is historically written and taught praises the virtues of the objective mind and warns against the wickedness and vanity of the ‘passions’ of the body and the heart.
Perhaps it is in reaction to this that many spiritual writers and teachers in the present age are celebrating the gifts of our incarnation – our embodiment, our gut – and the gifts of the heart – love and emotion.
Many books on prayer now speak of the need to find a relaxed posture, to breathe slowly and deeply, to release every physical tension, perhaps to use some simple symbol to help ‘focus’ and ‘center down’: this is one great celebration of our embodiment, our incarnation – the body and the gut zone.
Discipleship and pilgrimage are often now described in terms of love and love and love – for God, for neighbor, for one another, even for the self – a great celebration of the heart zone – rather than in heady lists of specific virtues or duties.
Churches are being built or reordered to look less like lecture theatres and more like meeting places for human communities. More and more churches are making the Eucharist, rather than ‘a service of the word,’ the main service of the day. Some Christians are even learning how to dance.
To be complete, the earthly, human Church of God needs all the gifts that God has given in making us the human children of God – all the gifts of all three of the distinct but interacting zones that define the whole human person: the head, the heart, and the body or gut. This is how God has made us: the human form in God’s own image – so perfect that God could dwell in it in Christ – in body, head, and heart.