Sunday's scripture was Psalm 139:1-12 (you can find it
here)
Penny's sermon:
The Hardest Exam of All. Delivered October 25, 2015 at the Congregational Church of San Mateo by Rev. Dr. Penny Nixon, Senior Minister.
Here is my response:
Penny brought up the enneagram on Sunday as part of her sermon. While we may put different levels of authority in personality tests, I think they can be a useful tool for self examination. As Penny exemplified humorously in her reaction to her own type, sometimes such tests can help us examine ourselves by pointing out tendencies that we may not realize we have. Developing self-awareness can be difficult, especially when we find ourselves to be less than ideal.
I think that one of the great strengths of the Christian tradition is the way that it can emphasize forgiveness and brokenness. Jesus picks a band of broken misfits for his disciples and asks them to rise up and become their best selves, which they do with varying success and at varying paces. When I was younger and I would do well in school, my parents were proud of me, but they were less concerned about my grades than they were with the level of effort I put into them. My parents wanted me to be MY best and were generally more impressed with a B that I put significant effort into than an A I had received easily.
In our culture that tends to celebrate on-paper kinds of success, it can be easy to confuse some types of success with internal value. Sometimes we are harsh on ourselves because we have not achieved success by our skewed cultural standards (If I don’t own a home, does this make me lesser than my friends and family who do?), it can also lead to celebrating ourselves in light of the same skewed standards (Am I conflating my level of worldly success with my sense of goodness?). I think it is true that the most difficult examination is internal. When I hold a mirror up to my soul, am I honest with my reflection?
We used the enneagram test in one of my classes recently and I also had difficulty with my results. I have trouble conceiving of myself as a security-seeking person because I want to be someone who lives bravely into the world, but as our class facilitator went through traits of my type and I thought about how I have a “back-up” of all of my cleaning supplies, toiletries, etc., it became clearer to me that really do try to build up “safety” around myself. Perhaps what I was calling pragmatism was rooted in a tendency toward feeling insecure.
Knowing that about myself helps me to see it when it starts influencing me in unhelpful ways. Having a backup bottle of Windex will likely serve me well, but other ways my insecurity touches my life may not be so helpful. Sometimes it takes something like a personality test or the words of a friend or loved one to help discern the ways I am not being my best self, but am letting myself feel content with the “easy A.” After a while, I might start to feel like I deserve that A, whether I do or not.
Since I am using the analogy of grades, I will confess that I received a C on a paper last year. I fell apart when I got that grade because it wasn’t how I saw myself. My initial reaction was, “I’m not a C student!” It felt unfair and harsh until I realized that I had been overconfident. I should have put more effort into that paper; I should have consulted the rubric instead of thinking, “I know how to write a paper.” It was an exercise in humility that I realize now that I needed at that time. While I was sad and angry at first, then underconfident in my academic abilities, the experience eventually led me to approach myself and my academics more honestly. Just because I “usually” got As didn’t mean I deserved one then. Similarly, just because I feel like I am generally a good person doesn’t mean I don’t have room for improvement or areas of my life in which I might deserve a C. While I might resist that kind of honesty with myself, I believe it will ultimately make me a better student of my own soul.
And I want an A.
