All Things Spiritual

An Introduction to Masculine Spirituality

The battle of the spiritual man is always with himself. Today we are seeing the sad results of our failure to prepare men for this battle. When great religion no longer teaches and defines our deepest soul, we face life unprepared for the trials that will surely come our way. The effects are all around us: legitimated and even glorified violence, compulsive addiction, breakdown of foundational relationships, projection of shame and blame, and a common inability to believe in ourselves, others and life in general.

It seems that we do not have the time or the skill to learn the great patterns for ourselves. They are learned over generations and passed down through what first seem like empty aphorisms, rituals and commandments. From current replacements such as "What goes around comes around" to classing proclamations of "Christ has died, Christ has risen, Christ will come again," the soul must imbibe the truths that it will not learn or is unable to learn by logic, computer or mere intelligence. We Christians call it divine revelation; Jews call it Torah and Talmud; most native peoples searched for such truth in myths, taboos, and consistently repeated feasts and ceremonies. Often, even mostly operating on a subliminal and unconscious level, great religion grounds, names, and liberates us for great truth. For God.

For a dozen different reasons many people, men and women, are unable or unwilling to hear these great truths through the mediation of western religious institutions. The language of personal trust, divine union, and living presence is not even considered because the first longings are untapped or even unrecognized. For many we have to go back to those primordial images and words in the presence of which we first opened our eyes to God: mother love, nature, silence, religious ceremony that "worked", childhood pictures that evoked awe, our first true love, the negative experiences of fear, betrayal, abandonment, and grief. Masculine and feminine spirituality are both trying to rebuild the gender foundations so that a grounded church can rise again.

There is a need to rediscover the great truths of life for ourselves. Hopefully we can see it is the same truth that our ancestors were talking about, and that the church is desperately trying to proclaim. It is called tradition and along with scripture is one of the two "fonts" of good theology. We need to go back to both of these fonts where we can drink long and deep: to follow suggestions for process and containment where men can grieve, rant, and sit in the belly of the whale without needing someone to blame or attack. That is precisely the mystery of church. Finally it leads to shared contentment and even rejoicing.

In this post-modem era we need a spirituality that appreciates the non-rational cyclic meanings instead of mere linear progress, the importance of the dark side of our spiritual education, which is also the importance of the outcast, the poor, and the failure in our lives. We need to move away from the false individualism of modernism back to social connectedness, to communal religion that is accountable for what it says it believes. Modem worldviews separated religion and science, the feminine from the masculine. Women have rightly become mistrustful of technology and power; men have unfortunately become mistrustful of religion and spirituality. Extemalization and innerness can no longer operate on different tracks. We need a language and experience that connect rather than react. We need some fundamental teaching that begins in union and aims toward further union. That will only come from great religion.

Our religious leaders have largely found themselves incapable of writing a pastoral letter on women, but it has never even occurred to them to write one on men. We seem to have resigned ourselves to church meetings where men are largely absent, to church ministry that is mainly run by women but overseen by a clerical caste, to an often soft devotionalism that attracts only a specific male clientele. Usually the men who do become involved in church are subservient and not the risk takers, leaders, and missionary personalities that attract other men. This is increasingly apparent in minority neighborhoods of the world where the men with religious ire invariably move toward evangelical churches and community service projects. We cannot continue to lose such men under a false banner of orthodoxy when it is usually an issue of control. It must be significant that Jesus chose working men, independent types, even a Zealot and a would-be betrayer to get this whole thing started. We are choosing our religious leaders in an increasingly narrow category. We can do much better.

Richard Rohr, O.F.M.