The Detours Are Sacred: Chris Heuertz on Grief, Love, and the Myth of Arrival

0:00

-30:38

If you’ve spent any real time with the Enneagram, you’ve probably felt Chris Heuertz’s influence whether you knew his name or not. Chris is the author of seven books, including The Sacred Enneagram (foreword by Richard Rohr) and The Enneagram of Belonging, with an eighth on pilgrimage coming from Simon & Schuster. But the books came out of a life: nearly three decades of humanitarian work across 70 countries, years in the anti-trafficking movement, time serving alongside Mother Teresa in Calcutta.

We recorded this a couple of weeks before his wedding, and I wanted it out in the world before he walks into that new life. We talk about learning to tell stories on a word processor in India, burying 700 of the women and children he served and what that does to a person, the end of a twenty-year marriage and the strange welcome into the human family on the other side of it, rewriting sloth for the Nines, what Eights actually feel under the armor, and why the detours are sacred and the arrival is a myth.

The difficulty in life is the choice.

Show-note links:

• Chris’s site: chrisheuertz.com

• The Sacred Enneagram and The Enneagram of Belonging (Bookshop.org)

• Chris’s Substack: Sacred Detours

• Instagram: @chrisheuertz

• Subscribe to The Difficulty: chadprevost.substack.com

• Listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

• The press where it all makes sense: crossroadspublishing.group

• Chad’s site: chadprevost.com