Often when men gather to tell their stories, and when trust is developed, the conversation moves below the surface and wounds are uncovered. This certainly occurred during the Men’s Institute at the recent Spiritual Directors International conference in Houston.
Through one journal writing exercise the men were invited to review their lives and identify eight to a dozen different steppingstones in which their spiritual journey changed direction. The steppingstones exercise, first developed by Ira Progoff, allowed each of the men to look back over his life and see those points that lead to the present situation.
Many recalled experiences of a deep wound. At some time later, there was a search for the meaning of the wound and how to integrate it into a future. As one man noted, we are healers of wounded men and are ourselves wounded men needing healing. There was a strong sense among the men of the connection between being wounded and significant spiritual awareness and/or growth.
Some men seek spiritual direction because of a crisis that has radically shifted the course of their life. Others may have been receiving spiritual direction for other reasons, but when a crisis occurs, seeing a spiritual director provides a different perspective upon the situation than other helping professions. For men, the crisis challenges our sense of control, the belief that we can protect ourselves and those we love from pain or turmoil, and the intellectual defenses that we have built up.
One man noted that in a situation where the director and the directee are men, just being in the presence of another man has a mutuality that cannot be replicated. While others noted that their directors have been women who effectively challenged and encouraged us in our growth as men. We all noted the difference in being men with men that we do not have the language to describe, at least not at this time, even though the difference feels significant.
At the same time, men are much less likely to intentionally seek out a formal relationship. One minister noted that he watches for men who arrive early for a meeting and hang nearby waiting to talk. Or, a man may be around the water cooler or any similar place where a casual conversation may be started. Once the conversation is started and a trust begins, a more private and separate time can be scheduled, and a deeper conversation begins.
As Kent Ira Groff wrote:
Ah! How is it stumbling stones
along our path
morph into steppingstones? Ah!
Monday, April 27, 2009
Thursday, April 23, 2009
Masculine Spirituality: A New Beginning
In a recent publicity stunt, a snack food company declared Nashville the Most Macho City. Points were awarded for the number of sports teams, hardware stores, and monster truck rallies. Also adding to the score was the popularity of hunting and fishing, NASCAR and other “masculine” interests. Cities lost points for high numbers of home furnishing stores and minivans. While it is silly, don’t those descriptions fit all of our stereotypes for men?
Yet, at a recent meeting of men during the recent Spiritual Director’s International gathering revealed a different side of masculinity. The group included men who make ourselves available as guides to others on a journey to know God. We asked each other two simple questions focused on our understanding of ourselves a spiritual men: “what values do you hold sacred?” and “how do you live the sacred in your life?”
Many of the values generated by the group were what you would expect from a self-identified group of religious people. The most common value was “presence,” often in a phrase such as “attending presence” or “practice presence.” Other values describe an intentionality about prayer, such as sacred listening, stillness, silence, discipline of devotion and reverence. Yet, these are not common descriptions of men in the popular culture of our time.
Another group of values reflects our relationships, with love and being loved as a foundation of who we are. Different aspects of relationship are treasured such as honesty, truth, trust, humor and intimacy. As one person described, we desire the ability to see the universe in the other. While men are often portrayed as wanting to be Casanova, that is not the kind of love reflected in those values.
But as I reviewed the remaining values, the ones that stand out are those that stand in dramatic contrast to the Macho City award. Those values include gentleness, mutual mentoring, vulnerability, acceptance, humility and availability. Our gathering of men claimed values that are often assumed to belong to women, and are culturally seen as alien to men.
I have various memories that confirm those values as deeply masculine. I know that whenever I visit my father, we hug each other closely both when I arrive and again when I leave. It was a ritual that I initiated as I left for college and that Dad has joyfully joined. Even in times of difficulty, we know that hug conveys our deep love, our acceptance and our commitment to each other.
I remember when David’s son Jeremy was rocking Sam, just 10 days old in his lap. As gentle father he was willing to give up sleep so Ann could get much needed rest. It is an image of love from one generation of men to the next that I will treasure the rest of my life.
I remember David holding my hand tightly as I was waiting to be wheeled to have my inflamed appendix removed, his face reflecting my own sense of fear. He stayed available to me so I would not be alone, even as he felt vulnerable to his own fear.
While some of us learned those values through our own father or other males in our lives, often the opposite was true. One man in the group described how he was raised by a macho father who believed in the stereotype male role. That man learned about the other values of love, relationship and spirituality much later in life through his engagement in a church community. Others in the group described how their fathers had failed them in becoming a mature man, stories of pain, loss and abandonment. They were difficult stories to hear, yet needed to be told in a group of men for healing to occur.
Whether through positive or negative life experiences, we have claimed our values as spiritual men and try to live them in our lives as well as our ministry. We told our stories to each other, beginning to heal ourselves while also committing to the healing of those men who come to us as guides. It is a new beginning.
Friday, March 6, 2009
Redefining Patience
At my job, the company is in the process of a very long reorganization which will radically change the lives of many, particularly me and my staff. The frustration with the leadership is that the process to rethink how the organization will function is being done solely by a small group of senor level staff. It is the classic situation where the few on the top are acting for the whole, keeping the process and content secret.
I understand the secrecy is being maintained out of a concern to protect the rest of us from the difficult and painful choices that are being made. At the same time, secrecy itself creates many destructive undercurrents within any system, whether a family or an organization. It is difficult to trust people working in secret when they do not trust you enough to say what is being talked about behind that wall of secrecy.
So when I ran across a subchapter of Seasons of Strength*, titled Patience in Disguise, it grabbed my attention:
This accurately describes the feeling many staff are experiencing at my office. When the reorganization was first announced in January, many responded with a mixture of anxiety and anticipation. I encouraged my staff to consider this an opportunity to rethink and improve our work for our customers. At the same time, I urged each person to consider his or her own strengths and weaknesses, to update résumés, and prepare to offer their skills to the leaders. In spite of some trepidation, they followed my urging with a positive spirit.
However, we learned recently that the final unveiling of the reorganization plan will not occur for another two months. Even though I had urged up the chain of command that a clear date to be announced, because it is easier for people to adjust to a concrete date than have no idea when it would occur, I was not prepared for the amount of negative emotions it triggered.
Now, I sense, both in myself in others, a second way in which patience is acted out.
There is a strong emotional appeal for a shut-down way of dealing with the situation. I lived through that my personal life very recently. While the Stoic way of patience can be sustained for short periods of time, it does lead to a complete closing down of one’s feelings, the good and the bad. You cannot allow only the good ones to come out, because once the door is open to the Pandora’s box, everything that is inside wants to be expressed. Many around me are hunkering down to do this over the many weeks ahead.
I know how exhausting and ultimately life-denying the Stoic position is, so, returning to the next passage from the Whiteheads’ book:
So, there is the “acceptance of loss” and the “patient attention to the experience, to both its absurdity and its meaning.” I have been working on that sense of having lost something, and the initial work of grieving what was good and nurturing for so long. This process of writing about what is going on, using an external concept to structure my internal process, is one way I engage in paying “patient attention.” It helps in staying out of extremes of passivity or Stoic control.
The authors later note that “shadows of ambiguity and conflict” are a part of the experience. Those shadows really are quite dark at times, obscuring a sense of where to go or what to do next. I sense it when other staff describe how they are coping with the situation. However, it is encouraging that the authors support the kind of internal work I am doing:
Just out of curiosity, I searched the Internet for the use of the phrase “receptive mastery,” thinking there must be come intellectual sphere in which it is part of the jargon. Indeed, I found the phrase is used in the study of how people learn a new language. In those situations, “receptive mastery” is a learning stage which may move forward into “productive” or “expressive” mastery in which what has been learned receptively reaches a level of active use. So before one can apply what is being learned, one has to actively “fully savor and experience” it. This engagement with the situation becomes essential in learning from it.
As I struggle to know how to lead my own staff out of the shadows, it is encouraging to know that I must also engage in developing my own self-awareness. I know I must continually be doing my own internal work so as not to manipulate or use them to meet my own personal needs. I know that in being a non-anxious presence with them, I can lead them with my own calmness and focus.
But that is not enough It does not lead me toward how to move ahead. The book fails to offer any further advice, turning its focus to other topics. So I will try to focus on paying attention with patience, knowing I will slide to the extremes of passivity or Stoicism. Maybe in that way I will discover some vision to follow.
*Seasons of Strength: New Visions in Adult Christian Maturing by Evelyn Eaton Whitehead and James D. Whitehead. Authors Guild Backinprint.com edition, 2003, p.89-90.
I understand the secrecy is being maintained out of a concern to protect the rest of us from the difficult and painful choices that are being made. At the same time, secrecy itself creates many destructive undercurrents within any system, whether a family or an organization. It is difficult to trust people working in secret when they do not trust you enough to say what is being talked about behind that wall of secrecy.
So when I ran across a subchapter of Seasons of Strength*, titled Patience in Disguise, it grabbed my attention:
"We can recognize three faces of patience, the first being its political guise. This is the virtue that is counseled to persons or groups seeking change. Thus women and blacks and the poor are told, “Be patient.” Here patience usually equals passivity. The communication is, “We will take care of it. Don’t rush us.” When this political advice is heeded, the “patient” mumbles that “nothing can be done” and succumbs to
impotence and inactivity. A virtue is twisted into weakness for purposes of social control.”
This accurately describes the feeling many staff are experiencing at my office. When the reorganization was first announced in January, many responded with a mixture of anxiety and anticipation. I encouraged my staff to consider this an opportunity to rethink and improve our work for our customers. At the same time, I urged each person to consider his or her own strengths and weaknesses, to update résumés, and prepare to offer their skills to the leaders. In spite of some trepidation, they followed my urging with a positive spirit.
However, we learned recently that the final unveiling of the reorganization plan will not occur for another two months. Even though I had urged up the chain of command that a clear date to be announced, because it is easier for people to adjust to a concrete date than have no idea when it would occur, I was not prepared for the amount of negative emotions it triggered.
Now, I sense, both in myself in others, a second way in which patience is acted out.
“The second visage of patience, that of the Stoic, appears at the other extreme. Stoic patience is a tough virtue, able to tolerate a great deal of pain. This “virtue” enables one to surmount feelings of loss or injury. Gritting his teeth, the Stoic keeps going. The Stoic “plays through the pain” with an iron will. In such an exercise of patience the person often denies the feelings that accompany the experience. . . . But in a deeper sense, it is a defensive lack of “patience” that we see – the refusal to be open, to receive, to be moved.”
There is a strong emotional appeal for a shut-down way of dealing with the situation. I lived through that my personal life very recently. While the Stoic way of patience can be sustained for short periods of time, it does lead to a complete closing down of one’s feelings, the good and the bad. You cannot allow only the good ones to come out, because once the door is open to the Pandora’s box, everything that is inside wants to be expressed. Many around me are hunkering down to do this over the many weeks ahead.
I know how exhausting and ultimately life-denying the Stoic position is, so, returning to the next passage from the Whiteheads’ book:
“Between these extremes of passivity and compulsive endurance is the active virtue of patience. . . . When we exercise this virtue we do not merely undergo an experience, such as illness or loss, but actively go through it. We are not just passive victims of the crisis; we face it. We can look into it and search out its meaning. This stance differs from both personal passivity and the gritty, Stoic denial of feeling. The virtue of grief, an offspring and heir of the human strength of patience, demands an acceptance of loss. This acceptance comes only with a patient attention to the experience, to both its absurdity and its meaning.”
So, there is the “acceptance of loss” and the “patient attention to the experience, to both its absurdity and its meaning.” I have been working on that sense of having lost something, and the initial work of grieving what was good and nurturing for so long. This process of writing about what is going on, using an external concept to structure my internal process, is one way I engage in paying “patient attention.” It helps in staying out of extremes of passivity or Stoic control.
The authors later note that “shadows of ambiguity and conflict” are a part of the experience. Those shadows really are quite dark at times, obscuring a sense of where to go or what to do next. I sense it when other staff describe how they are coping with the situation. However, it is encouraging that the authors support the kind of internal work I am doing:
“In psychological terms, this virtue demands receptive mastery. . . . to allow myself to fully savor and experience – whether of loss or delight. . . . Without this strength of receptive mastery, lacking the virtue of patience, we may be unable to “hold still” long enough to attend to what is happening to us.”
Just out of curiosity, I searched the Internet for the use of the phrase “receptive mastery,” thinking there must be come intellectual sphere in which it is part of the jargon. Indeed, I found the phrase is used in the study of how people learn a new language. In those situations, “receptive mastery” is a learning stage which may move forward into “productive” or “expressive” mastery in which what has been learned receptively reaches a level of active use. So before one can apply what is being learned, one has to actively “fully savor and experience” it. This engagement with the situation becomes essential in learning from it.
As I struggle to know how to lead my own staff out of the shadows, it is encouraging to know that I must also engage in developing my own self-awareness. I know I must continually be doing my own internal work so as not to manipulate or use them to meet my own personal needs. I know that in being a non-anxious presence with them, I can lead them with my own calmness and focus.
But that is not enough It does not lead me toward how to move ahead. The book fails to offer any further advice, turning its focus to other topics. So I will try to focus on paying attention with patience, knowing I will slide to the extremes of passivity or Stoicism. Maybe in that way I will discover some vision to follow.
*Seasons of Strength: New Visions in Adult Christian Maturing by Evelyn Eaton Whitehead and James D. Whitehead. Authors Guild Backinprint.com edition, 2003, p.89-90.
Thursday, February 19, 2009
Trusting God to be God
The words jumped out at me as I read the page, resonating beyond my half-focused attention to the book in my hand. “[W]e are primarily or even exclusively trusting God to be God in the ways we have become accustomed to thinking about God.*”
How true that is. It is so easy to settle into a habitual and narrowly defined relationship with God. Habits grow out of a desire for some predictability and stability, like the morning routine I follow to get ready for each day. While a morning routine cannot hurt you with its automatic patterns, habitual ways to approaching and thinking about God eventually will shut God out.
The routines or habits, done without thought, get in the way of seeing or responding to what has changed around us. Those accustomed ways of thinking about God become sinful, when sin is understood as a willful separation or turning away from God, because there is no attention focused on how God may be present or available in the moment.
Continuing reading, “Trusting God beyond the God we have understood or known up to now can feel very uncomfortable.” Learning to trust God is much more complicated than human relationships. It is easy to lose the sense of ongoing connection with God. There are times of doubt, times of wondering if God is even there or a self-delusion. Praying can feel like leaving messages on an answering machine. The words are said and the feelings expressed, but we are often left wondering if God is screening the calls, not picking up the phone.
Listening to directees, I hear a common experience of waiting without knowing, wanting some sense of connection and often finding none. Those times of not knowing undermine a sense of trust, especially during times of fear and emergency when the need to trust in God’s concern and support are the highest.
Over and over again we need to be alert to how God may be reaching out to us, in a new way, and learn to trust that God is there even when we do not perceive it. As I have re-read old journals, I have been able to see God’s action in my life in retrospect, even though I could not see during those periods of my life. Sometimes the ways God reaches out to us is so outside our understanding that God seems absent and invisible. It is only after the old understanding is broken apart that the new understanding can be found.
Bakke then points to the hardest part for me to swallow, “we are called to depend more on God than we do on ourselves – a very unlikely possibility unless we are aided by grace.” Or, in other words, only through acknowledging and accepting the grace that God extends to us will we be able to depend upon God. I struggle with this because it has a circular logic, or begs the question. In order to depend upon God, I need to be aided by grace which comes from God, and if I don’t recognize or accept the grace, then I cannot depend upon God.
I am quickly getting to the edge of what I learned about logical fallacies in college some (let’s leave the number out) years ago. I know that from a logical perspective, Bakke’s statement is false, but that doesn’t make it false as a faith statement. Since I claim to have experienced God in some small way, can I let go of my aversion to the circular argument, rather than getting caught in the intellectual barbed wire?
This is the leap of faith, moving far beyond my comfort zone at this time. I will leave it there for now, but it will still be nagging at me.
*Holy Invitations: Exploring Spiritual Direction by Jeannette A. Bakke. Baker Books, Grand Rapids, MI, 2000. page 63.
How true that is. It is so easy to settle into a habitual and narrowly defined relationship with God. Habits grow out of a desire for some predictability and stability, like the morning routine I follow to get ready for each day. While a morning routine cannot hurt you with its automatic patterns, habitual ways to approaching and thinking about God eventually will shut God out.
The routines or habits, done without thought, get in the way of seeing or responding to what has changed around us. Those accustomed ways of thinking about God become sinful, when sin is understood as a willful separation or turning away from God, because there is no attention focused on how God may be present or available in the moment.
Continuing reading, “Trusting God beyond the God we have understood or known up to now can feel very uncomfortable.” Learning to trust God is much more complicated than human relationships. It is easy to lose the sense of ongoing connection with God. There are times of doubt, times of wondering if God is even there or a self-delusion. Praying can feel like leaving messages on an answering machine. The words are said and the feelings expressed, but we are often left wondering if God is screening the calls, not picking up the phone.
Listening to directees, I hear a common experience of waiting without knowing, wanting some sense of connection and often finding none. Those times of not knowing undermine a sense of trust, especially during times of fear and emergency when the need to trust in God’s concern and support are the highest.
Over and over again we need to be alert to how God may be reaching out to us, in a new way, and learn to trust that God is there even when we do not perceive it. As I have re-read old journals, I have been able to see God’s action in my life in retrospect, even though I could not see during those periods of my life. Sometimes the ways God reaches out to us is so outside our understanding that God seems absent and invisible. It is only after the old understanding is broken apart that the new understanding can be found.
Bakke then points to the hardest part for me to swallow, “we are called to depend more on God than we do on ourselves – a very unlikely possibility unless we are aided by grace.” Or, in other words, only through acknowledging and accepting the grace that God extends to us will we be able to depend upon God. I struggle with this because it has a circular logic, or begs the question. In order to depend upon God, I need to be aided by grace which comes from God, and if I don’t recognize or accept the grace, then I cannot depend upon God.
I am quickly getting to the edge of what I learned about logical fallacies in college some (let’s leave the number out) years ago. I know that from a logical perspective, Bakke’s statement is false, but that doesn’t make it false as a faith statement. Since I claim to have experienced God in some small way, can I let go of my aversion to the circular argument, rather than getting caught in the intellectual barbed wire?
This is the leap of faith, moving far beyond my comfort zone at this time. I will leave it there for now, but it will still be nagging at me.
*Holy Invitations: Exploring Spiritual Direction by Jeannette A. Bakke. Baker Books, Grand Rapids, MI, 2000. page 63.
Thursday, January 29, 2009
One of 1.8 Million
Why was I on the Mall to see Barack Obama take the oath of office as President of the United States? Living five blocks from the Mall certainly made it seem an easy choice. Even though circumstances led to me being there alone, wrapped up in many layers against the temperatures in the low 20s, I knew I had to be there.
Perhaps it was the memory of January 1981, when I stood with feminist friends on the side of Pennsylvania Avenue waiting for the car with Ronald Reagan. We held up our signs proclaiming “ERA NOW,” one last argument against what Reagan represented. It was meaningless. It could do nothing to stop the self-interested, conservative era that has dominated the county for the last 28 years. So I needed to be on the Mall to see and believe in the dream of our country in which the values of compassion, respect for all people, and the protection of civil rights would be reaffirmed.
Perhaps it was the need to feel the positive energy of this time of transition. I don’t need to say “I witnessed history” as so many stated to reporters. That puts it immediately into the past tense, already written down. I needed to feel people around me who believe in the hope for a new way of honoring each other through our differences. I needed to be around others who want a new definition of what it means to be an American. Well, not really a new definition, but a return to a previously held definition, one that I find in the best times of our history.
Perhaps it was the belief that this man who knows discrimination and has been attacked because of a core part of who he is will understand how destructive that discrimination is to all of us. A man who is bold in stating his belief that those of us who are different from him in our sexual orientation are still to be treated as equals. A man who invited the Gene Robinson, a proudly gay man who also is a Bishop of my church, to begin a concert with prayer.
Perhaps I needed to be there for those who I know and love who could not. I have been surprised by how family members and others have responded to my talking about attending the inauguration ceremony. Even though I was at least a mile away, I stood there for others, representing their hopes and dreams for new possibilities. They can see the pictures of the crowd of 1.8 million, and know I am there, standing 50 feet in front of the Washington Monument. Sorry Dad, I did not wear anything on the top of my cap so you could pick me out, but I am there.
My prayers are with this new President, his administration, his family, and my country, that we can find a way out of fear into faith, out of manipulation into respect, and out of secrecy into mutual respect and trust.
Perhaps it was the memory of January 1981, when I stood with feminist friends on the side of Pennsylvania Avenue waiting for the car with Ronald Reagan. We held up our signs proclaiming “ERA NOW,” one last argument against what Reagan represented. It was meaningless. It could do nothing to stop the self-interested, conservative era that has dominated the county for the last 28 years. So I needed to be on the Mall to see and believe in the dream of our country in which the values of compassion, respect for all people, and the protection of civil rights would be reaffirmed.
Perhaps it was the need to feel the positive energy of this time of transition. I don’t need to say “I witnessed history” as so many stated to reporters. That puts it immediately into the past tense, already written down. I needed to feel people around me who believe in the hope for a new way of honoring each other through our differences. I needed to be around others who want a new definition of what it means to be an American. Well, not really a new definition, but a return to a previously held definition, one that I find in the best times of our history.
Perhaps it was the belief that this man who knows discrimination and has been attacked because of a core part of who he is will understand how destructive that discrimination is to all of us. A man who is bold in stating his belief that those of us who are different from him in our sexual orientation are still to be treated as equals. A man who invited the Gene Robinson, a proudly gay man who also is a Bishop of my church, to begin a concert with prayer.
Perhaps I needed to be there for those who I know and love who could not. I have been surprised by how family members and others have responded to my talking about attending the inauguration ceremony. Even though I was at least a mile away, I stood there for others, representing their hopes and dreams for new possibilities. They can see the pictures of the crowd of 1.8 million, and know I am there, standing 50 feet in front of the Washington Monument. Sorry Dad, I did not wear anything on the top of my cap so you could pick me out, but I am there.
My prayers are with this new President, his administration, his family, and my country, that we can find a way out of fear into faith, out of manipulation into respect, and out of secrecy into mutual respect and trust.
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