I am on the Executive Committee of the Southern Ignatian Network (SIgN) – a network of some 250 people in S. England involved in Ignatian Spirituality: encouraging and supporting individuals and groups in this work of promoting ‘Life in God’ and seeking to ‘find God in all things’. We seek to live it ourselves. About 15% of the members are men. At a gathering of the network in October, Sr Monica Helen Popper SSM voiced a concern of hers: “Why are so few men interested in spirituality?” A chat with her left me thoughtful: Are men congenitally averse to spirituality? What parts do nature and nurture play? Are we serving men badly, addressing the wrong spiritual issues?
I identify as a straight, white, 1st world male, with many of the prejudices of this minority. I am also a man who loves some women and men very dearly. Love is not a word that men often use in their relationships with each other. It is good to say it.
Part of my work is on the Ignatian Spirituality Course in London, training people in Ignatian spirituality and the art of spiritual direction. Of 80 current participants only 11 are men. The staff is more balanced at 7 women and 5 men. Knowing of my interest in gender issues, one of the staff showed me a note from an article he had been reading:
Women’s ... spiritual development occurs in relationship to their mothers. For men the developmental task is to separate from their mothers. Consequently, the psycho-spiritual development of men is defined by separation. This results in a stance toward life (and toward God and nature) that is marked by independence rather than relatedness. So the task in direction for men is to invite them into relatedness with self, others, God, and nature.
( The Soul’s Journey Through Abuse (Presence, Vol.5 p.42, 1999))
After I had held forth for a while he challenged me to write this article.
That same afternoon I said to a (gay, white, 1st world male) friend, a lay worker in a church, that I was pondering the dearth of men in spirituality. He squirreled me into a room away from prying ears, paused to gather courage. “A lot of men in church are wimpy, fey, wet lettuce-y, not strong, not positive: I don’t want that from a man.” I asked the Ignatian question: “What do you want?” “I want to talk about sex and the pub. I am still a spiritual person at the pub and I’m a sexual person in the church. Sexuality and spirituality are separated and this is so alienating. I want a man to be earthy – a man who identifies with both.” Strong words. I agree!
Recently, I went through a time of loneliness. One day I looked at people around me. I saw that, as much as I found women attractive, I am not one of them. Seeing men I felt, as if for the first time, contempt. I became conscious that I experience men in general as unattractive, lacking in awareness, wounded, violent and boring. Inside I was saying: “I don’t identify with them; I am not a man.” Then the realisation: “So, I do not belong anywhere. No wonder I am lonely.” I finally said, “No. I am one of them.”
For days I looked at men and said, “I am one of them.” With that new looking, my attitude shifted. I found in myself a growing compassion and identity with men. Now I have new mantras: I am one of them; I am one of us; I am a man and that is wonderful – I am fearfully and wonderfully made (Ps 139:14). This is not simply intellectual awareness. At times it is a whole body felt sense: I feel physically different, at home in my self. Maybe this is spiritual consolation.
I believe the spiritual journey is always a coming home to where I belong – in creation, on the earth, in society, in my body, as a man – and inhabiting that fully. So much religion excludes the body and sexuality from that glory of God which is the human being fully alive. This is doubly difficult if we men only define ourselves by difference. We are not women (who are experienced as attractive yet other); we cannot claim our full identity as men: as good, good to behold, good to inhabit.
There is good evidence that, in early life, we men have
to define ourselves by difference. In The Way Men Think,
say, of the baby in the womb, the
orthodox view is that the female pattern is the basic one, and that the male
pattern is a systematic, genetically programmed variation on it, triggered by
the action of the relevant sex hormones
.
They go on to describe how a girl child comes to know that she is like
mother and a boy as different from her and like his father.
In order to become mature men, boys have to separate from mother and
identify with father. Only then
can good relationships with women happen.
The difficulty in our culture is that many men grow up without a strong
presence of father with whom to identify.
Many of us never make the separation let alone the new identification.
This is not mother’s fault: it’s not her task.
Rare have been the men I could look to as rôle models of an embodied, strong yet vulnerable, loving, magnanimous yet risky, spiritual masculinity. How can I become such a man and be part of a life-filled band of men seeking ‘Life in God’? I see this as part of the structural sin of our society: there are few older, mature men to father, mentor and initiate younger men and boys into manhood. Many aboriginal cultures knew how to do this through extended rituals of separation from mother’s realm, encounter with father’s realm and return to society as a man. In our culture, boys (or adult boys in men’s bodies) try to initiate each other or never leave the mother’s realm. This cannot lead to adulthood and a life-giving engagement with the world. Consequently, and contrary to popular belief, men feel as much fear as power.
If men cannot make this transition then it becomes impossible to form right relationships with women, or the internal feminine. Men can experience a terrible dilemma: a pull towards women and a need for separation from them, and no one to help negotiate that wound. If, as the gospels and Ignatius suggest, a human’s deepest reality is love, yet as men we can love neither women nor men (and therefore ourselves), that love becomes poisoned. To plagiarise the advertisement for Star Wars Episode 1: what we cannot love we fear; fear leads to anger; anger leads to hate; and hate leads to suffering.
Love can be repressed in favour of rugged independence, misogyny, misandry, cynicism: the power-wielding, macho stance. (You see: misogyny is hate of self.) It can turn into addiction: desire nailed to the wrong object. Some, never separated from mother’s realm, assume feminine qualities to the detriment of mature manhood: the caring but powerless man who never finds what he truly desires because he never finds his true self.
If these issues are part of a man’s spiritual journey to full humanity, are we failing men by ‘initiating’ them into the feminine awareness of feelings and relatedness when they do not yet have a clear gender identity from which to begin?
I facilitate groups and retreat/workshops for men to explore, reflect upon and pray over these and other issues of masculinity. Please let me know if you are interested.
© J Maddock August 1999