Ian Morgan Cron

Jan 27

17 min read ⭑

“When you actually surrender, acknowledge your powerlessness, acknowledge your inability to manage life, when you really come to believe in a God who can do for you what you can’t do for yourself and give him consent to work, then suddenly, you discover that you are experiencing transformation.”

You may know Ian Morgan Cron best as the one who popularized the Enneagram with fresh, insightful language through his bestselling books “The Road Back to You” and “The Story of You.” But in addition to being a bestselling author, nationally recognized speaker and Enneagram teacher, he’s also a trained psychotherapist, Dove Award-winning songwriter and Episcopal priest. Growing up in an alcoholic family and having wallowed in the trenches of addiction himself, he has a passion for helping addicted individuals (and people who just want to live better) find lasting healing and solace by understanding themselves and God better. His latest book, “The Fix,” explores how the 12 steps can unlock a new, healthier way of living for anyone willing to give it their all.

Today, Ian’s getting honest about the most spiritually impactful moments of his life, the real reason behind his propensity to sink into addictive behaviors and the power of the Eucharist and silent meditation. Plus, take a look at the poets, authors and thinkers who have shaped his life the most.

The following is a transcript of a live interview. Responses have been edited and condensed for brevity and clarity.

QUESTION #1: ACQUAINT

There’s much more to food than palate and preference. How does a go-to meal at your favorite hometown restaurant reveal the true you behind the web bio?

A couple of things come to mind. One is I grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut, which is a small, leafy, affluent suburb of New York City. Many years ago, there was a restaurant there called Jack Forces Steakhouse. Back then, they had an organist — a guy playing show tunes on an elaborate B-3 organ. One night, when I was about 5 or 6 years old, he started playing “God Bless America” or “America the Beautiful,” and I stood up on my chair in that packed restaurant and began to sing at the top of my lungs. The entire restaurant went quiet and cheered for me to the point where I wouldn’t stop. They probably wanted to throw steak knives at me eventually, but this was one of those little moments that predicted my future. Not in the sense of being a showman — although I have done that in my life — but more that I loved the connection and realized it was a way to connect with people through art, words and presentation. And it was a harbinger of things to come.

Another one was when I took my kids and wife to Mexico City about three years ago. We went to this world-famous restaurant called Pujol. It’s one of the top 10 restaurants in the world, so it was a really special night. The highlight reel of my life will contain that night because the food was extraordinary, otherworldly, even. It cost a ridiculous amount of money, but every cent was worth it because it was a bit like a Baptist feast. At this table, with all of us looking at each other, sampling this incredible food was like a feast of life together in my little Enneagram Four mind. We had four servers just for our table, and watching them was like watching a ballet. They were there but not there. To me, that night was like the Feast of the Lamb, where my children and grace abounded. It was pretty beautiful.

classic books of poetry — Suzy Hazelwood; Pexels

QUESTION #2: REVEAL

We’ve all got quirky proclivities and out-of-the-way interests. So what are yours? What so-called “nonspiritual” activities do you love and help you find spiritual renewal?

I was really fortunate to be raised in my early years in the Catholic tradition. I say that because, in some ways, what distinguishes the Protestant and Catholic traditions is their imaginations. The Protestant imagination is very dialectical and analytical. It tends to see the world as bereft of the presence of God in a way. It focuses on fallenness, whereas the Catholic imagination sees the world as a place brimming with grace and God’s presence.

As Julian of Norwich said, “It is the madness of great love to see God in everything.” That is the world in which I was raised, where bread and wine mysteriously became the body and blood of Christ. This is a powerful work of the imagination. So I grew up with this way of seeing that God is everywhere. The problem is that we’re just not awake. Spirituality is about waking up and seeing the ongoing activity of grace in the world around us at every moment. It’s here. It’s in front of us, but we’re asleep. So my interests have tended to be things that help me wake up because when I am deeply connected to the presence of God in all things, that’s when I feel the best. That’s when I experience shalom, ultimate well-being. That powerful sense of being connected to the transcendent.

There are a couple of ways I do this. One is I love reading poetry. I can read great poets who sometimes take my breath away. In a way, what artists do is help us to see. They come in at a slant so that we’re not expecting it. It’s because they come into the door of our imagination, not through our prefrontal cortex, where we analyze everything. So I’ve experienced that sometimes when I’m reading poetry, particularly when I’m hearing a poet read their own work. It’s like Scripture in the sense that it’s awakening me to God’s presence. Whether it’s in what a poet writes about seeing the transcendent in nature or in some interaction, I think, Oh, there is God.

My wife and I are both huge fans of hiking and walking. We’ve hiked all around the world, and I have always felt deeply connected to the natural world and had some of my most profound spiritual moments there.

I’ll give you an example of one of those moments. One of the most seminal moments of my life occurred when I was 8 years old. I grew up in a very troubled alcoholic, Irish Catholic family. It was really rough, but I just always had this spiritual and artistic bent. I remember one morning getting up very, very early. I grew up in New England, and it was a beautiful fall morning when the sky was an incredible cerulean blue and all the sugar maples were on fire. The leaves were flaming with orange and red and yellow. It was just perfect, and I remember it was about 60 degrees and the breeze was fairly strong. I was riding my bike down a deserted street, and my eye caught this big sugar maple that was otherworldly. It was amazing. And I had a sudden, unbidden mystical experience. I was 8 years old looking at this tree, and I was suddenly overwhelmed with this feeling that everything was right with the world and that I was profoundly loved. I honestly will tell you that that was defining. It lasted for maybe seven or eight seconds. It was a kind of ecstasy. It totally arrested me. I’d never felt anything like that up until that point in my life. Never. It came out of nowhere. It just was a gift. It was a graced moment. At that moment, I had this realization that everything is connected and that, ultimately, we are in really good hands. I am in good hands. And that meant a lot to a little kid growing up in a rough situation.

QUESTION #3: CONFESS

Every superhero has a weakness. Every human too. We’re just good at faking it. But who are we kidding? We’re broken and in this thing together. So what’s your kryptonite, and how do you hide it?

I’m a recovering alcoholic and drug addict. I actually was in a 12-step meeting this morning, where I shared my story. To me, addictions are the result of being something of a frustrated mystic. It is looking for an external solution to an internal problem. In some ways, looking back on that history, I can see that what I was really looking for all along was God. I was looking for an experience like the one I had on the bike that day when I lost myself in something else. But the problem is that whenever you try to do that with something other than God, it will come back and get you. Trying to generate on your own any counterfeit experience of losing yourself and finding union with something else will eventually backfire on you.

Now, that is something that people know about me because I have shared it before, and in my new book, “The Fix,” I share even more deeply than I ever have about it. But that’s my kryptonite. Anytime I get around a mood-altering substance or behavior and begin to rely on it to give me what only God can give me — which is comfort and solace — it’s a counterfeit spiritual experience, and I’m off to the races. I just go all in. And that may be genetics, but I think it’s principally a spiritual matter. For everybody, whatever their addiction is, it’s an external solution to an internal problem, and it’s bound to end up in frustration because it’s like going to the hardware store to buy bread. You are not looking in the right place. The way the universe is set up, it invariably turns into an addiction.

QUESTION #4: FIRE UP

Tell us about your toil. How are you investing your professional time right now? What’s your obsession? And why should it be ours?

I just wrote a book called “The Fix: How the Twelve Steps Offer a Surprising Path of Transformation for the Well-Adjusted, the Down-and-Out, and Everyone in Between.” In it, I talk about a relapse that happened over four years ago after decades of sobriety that ended with me in 30 days of treatment. Like I said, when I go, I go hard. The book is an exploration of how the 12 steps of recovery are not just for addicts and alcoholics; rather, their design for living can benefit everybody. There are a lot of people who are 12-step curious or sober-curious — this book is for them too.

I’ll tell you a quick story. I ran into a guy — we’ll call him Gene — and he was the pastor of a large evangelical church, but he also had a secret drinking problem. Gene got sozzled one morning, and the elders figured out halfway through the sermon that he was a couple of sheets to the wind. And rather than giving him help and saying, “Of course, this is what humans do. This is normal,” they fired him. So one morning in the church basement, which is where most of my 12-step meetings happened, he asks, “Why is it that I have found more grace and compassion and love and acceptance in the basement of churches than I ever did upstairs?” And it’s because you have this collection of broken crayons. You finally have a plan. These 12 steps are designed for living. They are derived from a Christian organization called the Oxford Movement and are completely continuous with the Gospels and the teachings of Jesus. They provide us with a spiritual technology that can completely revolutionize the lives, not just of alcoholics or drug addicts or food addicts or whatever, but of everyday addicts, workaholics, people pleasers, whatever your thing is.

Everyone’s looking for a fix. It’s just human nature. In the book, I quote Christian psychiatrist Gerald May, who says, “To be alive is to be addicted, and to be alive and addicted is to stand in need of grace.” We are all somewhere on the addiction continuum, and none of us has one addiction. We’re cauldrons of them. We are averse to bad feelings or patterns of thinking, and we are seekers of pleasure and comfort. Our brains cooperate, and it sets up a perfect storm for finding behaviors or people or substances that have mood-altering effects and negative consequences.

Even if a person doesn’t identify as an addict or alcoholic, just working the steps would be a terrific benefit. The book explores that through my story. It’s very practical and shows people how to walk through the 12 steps that have saved the lives of hundreds of millions of people in the last 100 years — people who have experienced transformation at a level I’ve never seen as a result of any church discipleship program. Nothing compares to them. If you throw yourself into them 120 percent, you will reap the benefits. I wanted to democratize those steps so that everybody can understand the process. Maybe they have a loved one going through them. Or they can see where this is their problem too and are looking for a solution to what’s ailing them.

The 12 steps teach us that if the gospel is true, if you just let go and surrender, you will experience God doing for you what you can’t do for yourself. When you actually surrender, acknowledge your powerlessness, acknowledge your inability to manage life, when you really come to believe in a God who can do for you what you can’t do for yourself and give him consent to work, then suddenly, you discover that you are experiencing transformation. Transformation is what happens when you begin to change as a result of the activity of grace in your life in ways that surprise you.

QUESTION #5: BOOST

Cashiers, CEOs, contractors or customer service reps, we all need grace flowing into us and back out into the world. How does the Holy Spirit invigorate your work? And how do you know it’s God when it happens?

Someone recently asked me, “What inspires you to write a book or a song or a poem or whatever it is you do?” Well, it’s when the hair stands up on the back of my neck, I get a lump in my throat and something in me says, “Wow, that’s worthy of my attention and of the attention of people I love in the world.”

If I can make that topic or idea accessible and inspiring through words, I feel God’s Spirit is present. I go about my daily business, which involves thinking deeply about the spiritual life and about the inner life, and something will come along like the 12 steps or the Enneagram, and I’ll go, “Oh, that’s juicy.” To me, that is the Spirit working.

The influence of the Spirit doesn’t come in a way that’s very seismic. I think people often wait for a tornadic experience, but God often works more secretly than seismically in the light in our lives. What I try to do every morning when I get up is engage in practices that will help me go through my day attuned to what God is up to in my life and in the world around me so I can participate in it and not get distracted or even oppose it somehow by accident or on purpose.

QUESTION #6: inspire

Scripture and tradition beckon us into the rich and varied actions that open our hearts to the presence of God. So spill it, which spiritual practice is working best for you right now?

There is no such thing as this dichotomy between the secular and the sacred. Everything is sacred. We just don’t see it. Everything is loaded up with an invitation from God — every experience, every conversation, every time you wash the dishes, every time you pick up the kids at school. We typically fall into the trance of self or into the trance of our daily concerns, and we miss it. Spiritual practices are merely ways of sharpening my attention so that I can see what God is doing throughout the day, not just in that time.

In terms of spiritual practices, I try to begin every day with coffee, and there are some practices that have been terrifically helpful. One is that, as an Episcopal priest (perhaps I would have become a Catholic priest if they had let me get married), the pinnacle experience is the Eucharist. Celebrating the liturgy in the Eucharist is a spiritual practice I can’t live without. That’s huge for me. I love the Word. I love prayer. I love all these other practices. But to me, the Eucharist leads me to say, OK, God, this is where my eyes are opened. And I know many people don’t take it regularly. They may even dismiss it as something they’re supposed to do, so they do it once a month. If I had it my way, we would do it every day.

So that’s one. Another is a regular practice of prayer and meditation — once I’m in a good space. Protestants in particular have such busy minds, talk too much and are always trying to analyze something or pick it apart and make sense of it. I think what happens in centering prayer or Christian contemplation meditation is we shut off that discursive analytical mind, say to God in the silence, “Do in me what I cannot do for myself,” and rest. I’m not a biblical or a Hebrew scholar, but I find it interesting that the Bible has two words for “see.” One is the verb, the physical act of seeing, but the other one is the word “behold.” The best way I can describe beholding is how a mother looks at a newborn. This soft gaze comes over the face. You’ve probably seen it where you happen upon a mother looking at her infant in the crib, and there’s this eye contact between them where the child knows they exist and that they’re loved. As a therapist, I could probably say with some reasonable certainty that many of the worst conditions in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual have happened because that gaze was interrupted.

When we rest in meditation and prayer, we experience the mother-mirroring with God. We rest in that gaze. When I do this regularly, I notice it ignites a powerful, perceptive appreciation of the world, as well as a sense of being more attuned. I also notice unhealthy or unskillful behaviors and ways of being in the world begin to change on their own. Simply by resting in the gaze.

QUESTION #7: FOCUS

Our email subscribers get free e-books featuring our favorite resources — lots of things that have truly impacted our faith lives. But you know about some really great stuff too. What are some resources that have impacted you?

When I was 28, I remember exactly where I was. I was sitting in Saint Catherine of Siena Church in Riverside, Connecticut, with a copy of Thomas Merton’s “New Seeds of Contemplation.” I read chapter five that day. If you want to read that book but don’t have time, just read chapter five. And I remember that was a moment in my life when I felt the blinkers go on, and I took a hard right turn. It just changed the direction of my life and the way that I thought about spirituality.

One of the things that Merton taught me was that there’s no knowledge of God unless you have knowledge of self. And if there’s no knowledge of self, there’s no knowledge of God. That’s also Calvin. From that, we can deduce that it’s a perennial spiritual truth. Merton also asks: how does a foal, a baby horse, give glory to God? By being a foal. And how does a tree give glory to God? By being a tree without any falsity. Interestingly, animals and trees and the like have no capacity for falsity. For anything other than what they are. But, as Merton brilliantly says, human beings have this capacity to see something other than what they are and present themselves as a false self. And for him, to become a saint means to become himself. That’s what he’s pointing at. That was such a game changer for me as a young man trying to find my way in the world. To become a saint means to become authentically meek. It’s not to become some other version of me that’s better. It’s just to be me. And if I was just me, I would give glory to God, and he would recognize me because I would be the person he created. There would be no hiding behind masks. So meeting Merton was a game-changing moment.

Years later, when I went to Gethsemani, where he’s buried, I had an incredible experience standing at his grave and bawling my brains out. Not expecting it. Just suddenly overwhelmed because this was the man who woke me up, and 30 years later, standing at his grave, I had so much gratitude for what I learned from him.

A year ago, Rowan Williams introduced me to meditation, and that was a big game changer.

And then lastly, years ago, I wrote a book called “Chasing Francis.” And I remember it was such a weird set of circumstances and conversation that led to that book being written. I got a call one day from my then-new publisher. I had just sent the proposal and three sample chapters to get a deal, and this woman phoned me and said very quietly, “Do you know that you’re a writer?” And I said, “No one has ever asked me a question like that. No, I didn’t know that.” And she says, “Well, you do now.”

That was a major shift in my waters, thinking about why I’m here on this earth. She said, “You are a writer,” and I thought, That makes so much sense. I always had this profound love for words and wanted to put words together in a way that would connect with other people at the deepest level. But she named my vocation aloud. It wasn’t like she was trying to drop a pallet of bricks on me; she was just telling me I was a writer, but the way that it landed on me was like the Word of God.

We all have things we cling to to survive (or thrive) in tough times. Name one resource you’ve found indispensable in this current season — and tell us what it’s done for you.

I just spent the weekend with Malcolm Guite. Malcolm is a British poet who earned degrees from Cambridge. He’s also an Anglican priest for the Church of England and looks like something out of Harry Potter. He’s one of the craziest people I’ve ever met, and I adore him. He’s a poet, an expert in Tennyson and Coleridge, and one of the foremost experts on the Inklings and Charles Williams. He has this big, long beard, which makes him look like a hobbit, and he loves to drink port and smoke a pipe. He has reignited my interest in poetry as a way of understanding prayer and understanding a way of seeing the world. I actually read poetry frequently as a part of my daily spiritual time of prayer. I’ve memorized poetry from “The Book of Hours” by Rainer Maria Rilke. The famous one is:

God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.
These are the words we dimly hear:
You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.
Flare up like a flame
and make big shadows I can move in.
Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don’t let yourself lose me.
Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.
Give me your hand.

Now, if that doesn’t awaken your God sense, then you’re probably dead. Somebody should just tell you. Poetry’s been a really good resource for me, but you have to know where to look.

QUESTION #8: dream

God is continually stirring new things in each of us. So give us the scoop! What’s beginning to stir in you but not yet fully awakened? What can we expect from you in the future?

I’m going through a shift as I ask, “What will the next season of my life look like?” Someone the other day asked me, “Why were you born?” And I thought, Wow, that’s a great question, and I love good questions. And I said, “I was born to facilitate experiences and present ideas that deepen and improve other people’s lives.”

I do a lot of work with addicts and alcoholics and coaching, and the more time I can spend in the room face to face with people, the better I am. In the next season of my life, I think what’s stirring in me is figuring out how to do that more often. Podcasts are great, and so are books, but I actually never meet the vast majority of people who read or listen to them. I love it when I’m in the room with people, and maybe that’s the therapist in me. It’s like I want to be there when it happens because that’s where I feel most alive. So maybe trying to retool my life to do that more is what’s stirring in me.

“If the gospel is true, if you just let go and surrender, you will experience God doing for you what you can’t do for yourself.”

Ian said that earlier in this interview. What do you think about his words? Do they ring true? Or do you feel there is something more you need to do or add to make the gospel work for you?

Or, phrased a different way, from where do you draw your power in life?

As you carry on into your week, may these words resonate in your spirit: “For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes” (Rom. 1:16, ESV).

Ian Morgan Cron is a bestselling author, nationally recognized speaker, Enneagram teacher, trained psychotherapist, Dove Award-winning songwriter and Episcopal priest. His books include the novel Chasing Francis and the spiritual memoir Jesus, My Father, the CIA, and Me. Ian draws on an array of disciplines — from psychology to the arts, Christian spirituality and theology — to help people enter more deeply into conversation with God and the mystery of their own lives. He and his wife, Anne, live in Nashville, Tennessee.