Three Models of Spiritual Formation

Possibly the most psychologically sophisticated thinker in early Christianity, Evagrius of Ponticus (345–399 AD) developed a precise map of the interior life — the thoughts and desires that disturb the soul and derail the spiritual journey. His system is not a list of bad behaviors but a diagnosis of the inner movements that produce them.

Evagrius identified eight such movements. They form a progressive system: the earlier ones are bodily and obvious; the later ones are subtle and interior, capable of disguising themselves as virtue. If the early passions are the disease's symptoms, pride — the last — is its root.

Developed by Dr. Terry Hargrave (Pepperdine) and Dr. Franz Pfitzer (Fuller Seminary), this is a relational and therapeutic framework explicitly built on theological anthropology — the conviction that we are made for love and belonging, and that violations of that design produce predictable patterns of pain.

The entire framework pivots on two questions every person is perpetually trying to answer: Who am I? (identity, worth, value) and Am I safe? (security, trust). When answered well, people move and relate from peace. When violated, from pain.

The coping behavior solves the wrong problem. It manages the symptom — the feeling — rather than the underlying wound. And because it typically activates the other person's wound, it makes the overall system worse. The counter-truths of the peace cycle are not positive self-talk; they are claims about identity in God — the self that exists prior to and independent of wound and performance.

Fr. Thomas Keating OCSO (1923–2018), Trappist monk and founder of the Centering Prayer movement, identified three core instinctual drives all human beings are born with. Not sinful in themselves — like hunger or thirst — but infected by sin and misrouted by experience.

No caregiver, however loving, can perfectly meet all three needs. In childhood, the drives get sabotaged. We develop emotional programs for happiness: unconscious strategies for getting these needs met through our own devices, apart from God. Formed before reflective capacity develops. Triggered automatically in the present by anything resembling the original wound.

JMC's own example: growing up with internal chaos, he built a life of extreme external order and cleanliness — if the outer world is controlled and tidy, the inner world will feel safe. It works. Until family arrives home, music turns on, messes appear. The program fails. What emerges is not love.

The fork in the road becomes visible by one's 30s and 40s: those who take the inner journey and face their pain in prayer and community, and those who reach a level of functional health and stay there. The gap widens over time. The practices — prayer, silence, community — are not the destination. They are space in which God can expose and heal the programs at the level of the unconscious.

JMC takes Keating's framework and adds a practical diagnostic layer. The Enneagram, he argues, is not useful as a personality theory — "it would never hold up to even cursory scientific scrutiny" as a typology — but it is extraordinarily useful as a map to your particular emotional program for happiness. Each of the nine types describes a specific strategy for managing pain around one or more of Keating's three drives.

The crucial reframe: your Enneagram type is not your identity or your essence. It is your wound response — the particular way you learned to cope with not getting safety, love, or agency met in childhood. This is why old, spiritually mature people are hard to type. The program has loosened its grip.