Some people have asked me what the “male spirituality” category on the website refers to. Putting a gender on spirituality seems at best unnecessary, and maybe silly or exclusionary. Nor have I written a great deal on this topic, as I have less than a year’s worth of experience with it, and with all things spiritual, it is best to exercise caution in speaking of it.
But the next Rites of Passage for Men will take place September 23-27 in New York, and now is the time to proselytize for it. I hear the numbers of applicants are down this year, and blame for that can only be laid at the feet of those who have done it, found good things there, and said nothing to anyone else about it.
The Male Spirituality movement is a response to a number of interrelated problems. First of all there is a striking gender inequality in participation in Christian churches: in America, where the situation is not as bad as elsewhere, two-thirds of church attendees are women. In Italy and the Latin countries you might almost say that Christianity is a religion for female worshippers (and male priests). The founder of the movement, Richard Rohr, said, “I cannot believe that the great Gospel of Jesus Christ has nothing to say to men.” The theory (which I concur with) is that Christian churches have gone astray in their practice, substituting church attendance for real spiritual experience, and that this has particularly affected men, who for the most part find little in mainstream Christianity that they can even respect.
Another problem is that our society is addicted to the spiritual and personal language of ascent – success. Go to a high school reunion and you will see people presenting their lives as happy, exciting, interesting, and successful – and then wondering why they come home to their real lives feeling empty and deceitful. This kind of continual one-upmanship is a dominant pattern in our society. It is particularly common among men, whose social interactions are filled with this struggle for superiority and self-reliance. But it is not Christian – Christ more than anything taught a way of descent, a going down into your pain, a harrowing of your own hell. This should be the heart of all Christian practice. “No sign will be given them but the sign of Jonah.”
Life tends to give us these initiations, when we have no choice but to go down and confront ourselves as we really are. I had my first major one when I was twenty, and it deeply affected me, but not receiving any instruction as to its meaning or what I could do with it, I found myself, after some years, falling back into the same problems. This of course, as it always does, brought me to a similar crisis, twelve years later. This time I am striving with all my might not to miss the call to deeper life.
Another major problem is that there is precious little mentoring and spiritual direction in our society. I have felt, for most of my life, a deep hunger for “a guide to come and take me by the hand” – simultaneous with a deep sense that all the guidance I had been offered missed or misunderstood all my deepest parts and hence needed to be resisted. In the male spirituality movement I have found something entirely different and satisfying: not a Procrustean attempt to cut me down to a single mold, but leading me deeper into myself, not offering easy answers but staying with the mystery. To be quite frank, I’m not certain I ever realized that this was what religion was really about.
Rohr is convinced that early Christianity offered far more of this than it does today, and that baptism was a real initiation, whose meaning was the Paschal Mystery – death and resurrection – and where real instruction in tapping into a source of life deeper than your own ego was provided. Hence the Rites of Passage. Most of the information in it is conveyed by ritual and the experience of being simply one among many, freed from the one-upmanship games of society. As with all recommendations, this movement may simply be a good fit for me, not for everyone. But I do invite all men to consider it. The home website is www.cacradicalgrace.org, look for the “Men’s Work” section. The experience, as I have had it, is truly “incarnational” – a movement towards being at home in the world and in your own flesh and your own being. For me it also had intellectual interest, as the experience was much like what I have read of in the “Mystery Religions” of the ancient world – of which, of course, Christianity was one.
Why men need this in particular is a good question, and one of the better criticisms of the Male Spirituality movement is that its focus on men may be a good answer to the problems of the previous generation. Traditionally in initiation rites throughout the world, it was the men that needed to be taught about pain, taught how to cry, taught to see their shadow, and taught how to build a bridge between inner and outer experience. That there is a male need for this in our society I have no doubt: we see men everywhere who have no access to their own inner life, no sense that it is useful or good or anything other than an obstacle to their smooth functioning in mechanized society. But the women my age seem to need this training just as much as the men! A group, about which I know little other than that mention of them appeared in Rohr’s publication Radical Grace, runs an initiation for women. The link is: http://www.riverstoneretreat.org/current_offerings.html#wrop
Furthermore, we have not even to risk the adventure alone, for the heroes of all time have gone before us. The labyrinth is thoroughly known. We have only to follow the thread of the hero path, and where we we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god. And where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves. Where we had thought to travel outward, we shall come to the center of our own existence. And where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world. – Joseph Campbell
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