Friday, December 13, 2019

#33 Men, agents of and pathway to cultural metanoia (masculine cultural DNA)


The definition of masculinity appears to have been taken over by the sociologists, the feminists and the activists. Words like hegemonic masculinity, complicit masculinity, marginalized masculinity, the “man box” have all risen out of the academic vocabulary as many scholars attempt to address the emergent issues of relations between the genders. Specifically, male violence, dominance, abuse and the roots of the attitudes, perceptions and beliefs that engender malignant and even criminal actions against women have become a focus in many women’s studies departments, with considerable justification.

In these various studies there have also been attempts to explain how men are themselves “trapped” into a pattern of dysfunction and even self-sabotage, without in any way patronizing or condescending to the male gender.

And while the study of gender, both masculine and feminine, is appropriate and warranted by the disciplines of sociology and psychology and certainly education, there is another approach that warrants serious consideration and examination by people engaged in the study of history. Traditionally, history, and historiography have operated within specific perspectives: economic history, philosophic history, political history, military, legal history, institutional history, ideological history and even biographical history. Anthropology and the study of culture, emerging in a complex, multi-disciplinary incubator, especially the history of culture, seem to be useful in the desire to open up to the theoretical notion that men, and everything that comes with men, their/our psychology, their/our biology, their/our religion, their our mythology (ies), their/our cosmology (ies), their/our governance, their/our philosophies have sat atop the totem pole of western (and perhaps eastern) culture from the beginning.
Some of the assumptions that have attached themselves onto a plethora of cultures from the earliest evidence of human communities, originating from men, individually and/or collectively have shaped their respective initial communities and many ensuing cultures, and, like old slippers, have been taken for granted as  normal, conventional, reasonable and the converse of each of these, abnormal, unconventional, unreasonable and worse, unacceptable. Whether designed as complicit forces gestating ideas about the nature of human beings and the universe we inhabit, or inadvertent collisions of persons, ideas, activities, curiosities and beliefs about the human place in the universe, we can and need to trace our cultural roots back to the dominance of masculinity.

Physical stature and strength as the determining factor in the community decision about whether men or women would wield the plow to prepare the field for seeding. Physical perceptions, sensate perceptions, themselves, have continued to hold sway over a measure of “reality” and the segregation of that reality from another more mystical, mysterious and speculative reality. Cave paintings, the earliest scribblings on animal skins and later parchment have, to our best knowledge, been inscribed originally by men and then recorded for future generations, also by men. A similar propensity for physical strength accompanies the design of implements for foraging for food, and for warding off enemies, themselves apparently mostly other males from other tribes. Inside the earliest caves and huts, where food was prepared, children nursed, nurtured and disciplined, principal agents were naturally women.

In the attitudes, perceptions, values and aspirations of these two role differentiations, there were distinct differences ascribing importance to physical, sensate, extrinsic aspects of human life, as compared with the more intuitive, imaginative, intrinsic, emotive, and aspirational aspects of human life. Of course, neither “role” brought either implied or asserted attitudes; however, segregated  perceptions about the differences between men and women naturally occupied developing vocabularies, defining the very parameters of what individuals, families and communities not only tolerated, but considered aspirational. Implicit in these differences were highly subtle and sophisticated notions of how things work, who the people were, what needs needed to be paid attention, starting with survival.

Survival itself evoked different perceptions, depending on the views of the dominant males in the cultures. For example, in ancient Greece, the two communities of Athens and Sparta adopted very different educational systems based on very different goals: for Athens, to produce good citizens, for Sparta, to produce a powerful army. Both systems, undoubtedly, were designed by men, and in Sparta, for example, girls were excluded from the educational system.

Yet, without debating the specific differences between the two systems, we can likely agree that men were the primary gender in their design and execution. Similarly, the military was designed and managed by men as was the system of governance. Long before the Ancient Greeks, early Babylonian cultures had imagined and worshipped various gods, in an attempt to seek and to understand how to “be” and to survive in their universe. It was, according to whatever parchment, clay or cave markings, primarily men who recorded their thoughts, images beliefs and rituals for their communities. Whether a choir of deities, each with a specific “role” in the panoply of human mysteries, or a single deity, these basic notions of something supernatural were the marks of masculine consciousness. And our inheritance, for better and worse, has male DNA all over it.

The “Garden,” the “Epic of Gilgamesh,” the “tablets,” the “parting of the sea,” “the wandering Jew,” the “chosen people,” the “decalogue,” the “song of Solomon,” the “David v Goliath” story, the various reigns of various monarchs, and even the “Manger” the “Wise men,” the “Death and Resurrection,” the “Empty Tomb,” the “Transfiguration,” the “apocalypse” and the “end of time,”….these concepts all originate in the mind, heart imagination and spirit of men, in the strictest male sense of that word. Similarly, the “Sermon on the Mount,” and the “Lord’s Prayer,” as well as the various gospel and letters to various emerging church communities are all the legacy of men. Not only the original texts, but also the midrash, the hermeneutics, the exegeses and the dissemination and interpretations of the various “sacred” texts of the Jews, the Christians and the Muslims all originated from the men in those communities. So too, the various “Gods” as conceived by the various faith communities, were themselves masculine.

Women, in their supportive, supplicant and even “sacred” roles, as testified in the various texts, nevertheless, were segregated from the ‘higher’ significance of the men. And this disparity served as both a model worthy of emulation, and also as an expectation that helped to determine loyalty, obedience, compliance, authority and the bases of judgement for all. Legal systems, too, owe their origin to men like Ur-Nammu and ancient Sumerian ruler in the 22nd century B.C., and King Hammurabi around 1760 B.C. Casuistry is a process of reasoning that seeks to resolve moral problems by extracting or extending theoretical rules form a particular case, and reapplying those rules to new instances, in applied ethics and jurisprudence.

“The Sophists of fifth century Greece maintained that since no universal truths could be affirmed in moral matters, right and wrong depended entirely on the circumstances: ethics consisted in the rhetorical ability to persuade persons about “opportune” action. Plato devoted his Republic to a vigorous refutation of this thesis, placing moral certitude only in universal moral truths: ethics consisted in transcending particularities and grasping permanent ideals from which right choice could be deduced. Aristotle proposed that in ethical deliberations, which dealt with contingent matters, formal demonstration was not possible. Rather, plausible argument would support probable conclusions. Ethics belonged, he maintained, not in the real of scientific knowledge but in the domain of practical wisdom (phronesis). Phronesis is a knowledge of particular facts and is the “object of  perception rather than science. Criticism, interpretation and amplification of these theses constituters much of this history of moral philosophy. The Aristotelian viewpoint, which places moral certitude in the domain of practical judgements about what ought to be done in the actual circumstances of a situation, is the remote philosophical ancestor of the casuistry that developed in Western culture.” (Britannica encyclopaedia)

Certainly, the debate between particular circumstances versus ideals, can be traced from the deepest and earliest thoughts of western thinkers (men) up to and including contemporary debates, discussions and even new academic theses, now permitting the participation of women. Scientific “knowledge,” empirical knowledge, the pursuit of its findings, the arrangement of its findings, and the conclusions drawn (or not) from the null hypotheses on which the research is based, comprise not only the pathway to moral judgements, but also the rigours of academic excellence.

Process underpinning the assembling of information, keeping the objectivity and the detachment of the scholar engaged in the research, has become the accepted methodology of the dominant academic disciplines, and consequently of the hall graduates of the various disciplines operating under those “guidelines.” And they were originated by generations of male thinkers, writers, scholars and power-driven men.
Governance derives from the Greek verb kubernaein (kubernao) meaning to steer, the metaphorical sense first being attested in Plato. Regardless of which institution “governs” in which domain, the concept of governance comprises “the conscious management of regime structures with a view to enhancing the public realm.” (grdc.org/u-gov/governance) The thinking process, the capacity to define, to articulate, and to execute originating with men, to be sure men of avowed capacity, intellect and public respect, comes to us through the male brain, the male imagination and the male perception of the universe.

Our scientific heroes, too, come primarily from the masculine gender, women having been almost excluded from the laboratories, the lecture halls, the libraries and the bars and pubs where the men debated their respective “findings” with other men, often using women as their “subject” specimens. Early humans did not consider disease to be an integral part of nature; consequently they regarded their invasion as supernatural, displeasing to the gods. Their use of herbs and plants as curatives, while likely originating from the imaginative interventions of the women in the family and community, were documented by men. 

“In the Louvre Museum, a stone pillar with the inscribed Code of Hammurabi, a code which includes laws relating to the practice of medicine, with severe penalties for failure. E.g. ‘If the doctor in opening an abscess, shall kill the patient, his hands shall be cut off;’ if however, the patient was a slave, the doctor was simply obliged to supply another slave. Greek Historian Herodotus stated that every Babylonian was an amateur physician, since it was the custom to lay the sick in the street so that anyone passing by might offer advice. Divination from the inspection of the liver of a sacrificed animal, was widely practiced to foretell the course of a disease….In Egypt, Imhotep, chief minister to King Djoser in the 3rd millennium BCE, who designed one of the earliest pyramids…and who was later regarded as the Egyptian god of medicine and identified with the Greek god Asclepius. Super knowledge comes form the study of Egyptian papyri, especially the Ebers papyrus and Edwin Smith papyrus discovered in the 19th century. The former is a list of remedies, with appropriate spells or incantations, while the latter is a surgical treatise on the treatment of wounds and other injuries….and while the practice of embalming the dead body did not stimulate the study of human anatomy, the preservation of mummies has, however, revealed some of the diseases suffered at that time including arthritis, tuberculosis of the bone, gout, tooth decay, bladder stones, and gallstones; there is evidence too of parasitic disease schistosomiasis, which remains a scourge still. There seems to have been no syphilis or rickets.” (Britannica encyclopaedia)

Right wrong, heaven hell, highly sophisticated definitions of reality within circumscribed parameters, processes and implications, even the nature of God and the relationship of God to humans…all of these emanated from the mind, imagination, pen and tools, including armaments of men….and their implications and definitions of importance, power, significance and relative value to young minds all these twenty centuries later continue to cast their spell on our lives.

Some of the assumptions that we have inherited from the masculine “reign” include:
·        Physical size is highly significant
·        Emotions are ephemeral and fickle
·        Children and their education is less important in the public square than the military and the system of governance and the production of laws
·        The economy measures the value of the society, not the health of its citizens
·        Status and power, measured in extrinsic terms trump intrinsic identities
·        The pursuit of power and status represents the highest achievement of humans
·        The poor and the indigent are and remain voiceless and out-of-sight-out-of-mind
·        People different from us are more to be feared than embraced
·        Wars and conflicts continue to erupt to demonstrate dominance, colonization, subordination…under the guise of “maintaining order and control
·        Caste systems of “have’s” and “have-not’s” have solidified into the cultural norms on all continents
·        The earth, as a life-giving and life-sustaining resource continues to be regarded as a renewable resource, unless and until it dies, much as men regard their human body
·        Intuition is suspect as is mysticism, spirituality, religion, faith and all things intrinsic
·        Men remain trapped in a highly charged and limiting “encasement” of expectations including oppressors, abusers, tyrants, deviants and criminals
·        The judicial system begins with the premise that only through hard and severe punishments will miscreant behaviour be changed
·        The rise of feminism, while empowering many women legitimately, also does not incorporate into its intellectual underpinnings, the depth and breadth of history of male dominance as historically normative, and not as “abuse” of the feminine.

Thursday, December 12, 2019

#32 Men, agents of and pathway to cultural metanoia ( choosing masculinities)


Men grow up emulating their fathers, whether consciously or not. And for many, that emulation (adulation?) can be a trap, if the father’s role model was dysfunctional. Even if the emulation begins in a benign way, with a perception that ‘how Dad was with Mom’ is the way men are ‘supposed’ to be with their partners, for a considerable period in the young man’s life may be limited, if not outright debilitating.

Lots of stories abound about young men believing they cannot ever please their fathers, and they flounder with excessive compensation, usually self-sabotaging, trying too hard to attract and to warrant their father’s approval. Even if our father’s limitations were, for him, debilitating, (example alcohol or drug addiction) some young men nevertheless grow up holding their father in deep respect. Often career choices by young men amount to a “paint-by-number” re-do of their father’s career, profession or business venture. On the positive side, stories also abound about professional athletes whose fathers paved the way as professional athletes in the same sport.

Whatever the situation, young men’s experience of masculinity comes first from  the father figure in their life. This father-imprint seems to go deep into the fibre of the young man’s self-perception, attitudes, behaviours and even expectations. Such a deep imprint apparently impacted the life of a reporter, then for Esquire, who wrote a profile on Mr. Rogers, and whose relationship with the children’s television host forms the basis of the recently released movie, A Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood. Tom Junod writes about the relationship with the ordained Presbyterian minister (Rogers) in the recent edition of The Atlantic.

Growing up with an alcoholic narcissistic father, Junod (Lloyd Vogel in the movie) nevertheless admired his father.
He writes:

My father, Lou Junod, was a boozy philanderer, to be sure. But he was also a fetishist of his own fragrant masculinity…I had never rejected him or his message, which was that nothing is more important about a man than the way he looks, the way he carries himself, and the mystery of what my father called his ‘allure’.
I hadn’t become a hard-bitten investigative journalist consumed by anger, but rather an ebullient charmer concerned by my capacity for silken cruelties committed in the name of revelation.
 I idolized my father, despite my mother’s warnings. I was seduced by him, and once I attained a degree of success I worried that I had no choice but to follow in the Bally-loafered footsteps of the man who had caused me-and my serially betrayed mother—such pain.
Following the original piece Junod wrote on Mr. Rogers in 1998, the two became friends until Rogers died in 2002. Roger’s deliberate and determined effort to get Junod to appreciate himself started with the perception, belief and constant reminder of Junod’s value, goodness and that he too was “once a child”. The latter phrase was one Rogers deployed in his portrayal of all others. He utters a line in the movie, Won’t you be my Neighbour?: “the real job we have..was to make goodness attractive in the so-called next millennium”.

Junod writes about that movie: (It) became so popular because it makes people cry unashamedly, because it shows what radical kindness actually looks like because it depicts a man who gave his life to what turned out to be a hopeless cause—the curse of sacralising mass media. He was a genius; he had superpowers; he might as well have been a friendly alien, thrown upon the rocks of our planet to help us find our way to the impossible possibility that we are loved.

The key point, for Junod, and for many millions of other males, is that Mr. Rogers offered him a choice about how to be a man, even though that choice was based on a perception of value for which Junod could not appreciate.

Male role modelling, whatever the source, is a vibrant and traditional archetype for young men, so important in some cultures that rituals of passage are conducted by the elders of the community with their young men, in hopes of imprinting their definition of what it means to be a man. Military cadets, cubs and scouts, athletic teams, music ensembles, uncles and grandfathers who make themselves available to their young nephews and grandsons…all of these experiences help to shape a young man’s “choices” about his incarnation of his own masculinity.

For many young men, like Junod, the existence and variety of role models, those who really “get” us, is limited by our own perception of our adequacy. Young men facing exposure (not in the physical, but rather in the skill, knowledge and attitude senses) fear judgement, especially by men whom they admire. Rarely, however, does this fear reach the larynx, blocked by another even deeper fear that a peer will find us “weak”…

And weakness is defined by however and whatever benchmark and trait a peer chooses. Physical stature, body shape, athleticism, mechanical dexterity, problem solving, risk-taking (or aversity), even thickness of glasses, wardrobe, race and ethnicity, religion and for some teacher’s favourite….these are just some of the hooks that catch the attention of a peer who is himself trying to find out both who he is and who his friend is. Dissing, then, has to be discerned from outright abuse, given the paradoxical nature of acceptance and friendship atoned by a kind of derisive teasing.

It is the “strong” young men versus the “weakling” that defines much of early boys’ social interactions with peers, and too often with parents who, themselves have fully cloked their definition of masculinity in stereotypes that abound in contemporary culture. Crying, for example, is too often ridiculed, or curtailed by mothers who do not want their young boys to be “cry-babies”…And that message, of minimizing or even denying physical pain or illness, follows millions of men to their grave. I once asked a family physician if her male patients follow her “orders”. Her response was typical: “They are usually so ill by the time they get here that they really have no choice.”

Crisis management, in one’s own life, about one’s personal health and well-being, is a model that has saturated western culture for centuries. And that model, given the highly influential male dominance in the culture, pervades many of the modalities of our culture. Medicine, for the most part, intervenes in crisis, and has for too long remained silent about preventive approaches. The justice system, too, intervenes in crisis, and remains silent and inactive, for the most part, with respect to prevention unless and until some crisis requires a strong political and preventive action. Social service agencies, too, rely on a crisis-management model, with meagre and inadequate resources dedicated to preventive education, training, and even the basic of classical conditioning, that only recently have some health care private companies (in the U.S.) begun to entertain.

And because crisis management is such a deeply revered, even sacralised modality throughout our culture, we face an existential crisis with respect to global warming and climate change. The masculinity of Mr. Rogers, so obviously and nefariously demeaned for decades, as pertaining exclusively to children, and clearly not appropriate for adults continues long after his death to be an example of what our culture considers quixotic, so tilting at windmills is it considered. And yet, given the massive budgetary commitments to militarizing our various states, (and now established yesterday by the U.S. House of Representatives a “Space Force” as another arm of the U.S. military!), add to which another massive national security behemoth and cyber capability, the ever-present magnet of a military uniform for hundreds of thousands of young men, with an overt resistance to community development, teaching social work, nursing and caring professions by millions of young men, Mr. Rogers is not only a hero to some but an anathema to others.

Choices of masculinity will only matter to those men for whom options have already become integrated to their lives. If the alpha-male model dominates a neighbourhood, a high school, and cadet corps, a football, basketball or hockey team and a workplace, it will be very difficult for many young men to break out of feeling a need to follow suit as another alpha male, if for no other reason that to be accepted by the men in the neighbourhood.

It is not only racist and physical abuse by coaches (in the National Hockey League) that needs to be examined, nor the kind of sexual abuse that attends many Olympic sport teams that needs to be put under the microscope. And that microscope, far from being restricted to a narrow legal definition of the “issue,” needs to reach into the child’s life, the kind of abuse and neglect, the kind of power dynamics in which s/he was raised.

There is a lasting prophetic diamond in the repeated phrase of Mr. Rogers: “He too was a child once!”

It was not until Tom Junod actually witnessed a screening of the movie, A Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood, that he heard Tom Hanks (Mr. Rogers) speak with Matthew Rhys ( Lloyd Vogel) that he actually discovered the mystery of what Mr. Rogers had seen in him:

“You love people like me,” Matthew Rhys tells Tom Hanks. And when Hanks asks,
“What are people like you? Rhys answers,
“Broken people.”

And displaying an intimacy and a courage rare in journalism, especially his kind of hard-hitting journalism, Junod reflects:

“And that broke me, though I had never uttered those words to Fred (Rogers) in my life. He saw something in me, yes. Did he also see through me? Was my brokenness so obvious to him back them. Was Fred’s offer of friendship also a form of judgement? …

In his reflective summation, Junod writes:

The last thing Fred Rogers ever said to me was, “How like you.” He gave so much to me, so much trust and friendship, without asking me to earn it. But still I wonder whether I have. Still I find myself asking for his blessing, and like the aged Private Ryan (played by Tom Hanks in Saving Private Ryan) after he walks away from the grave of the officer who rescued him, I issue a plea that sounds a bit like a prayer:

Tell me I’m a good man. Tell me I’ve lived a good life, then tell me what to do now.

This prayer is now, has been, and will continue to be at the heart of every man’s search, no matter the object of the utterance. And, whether the plea goes to a mother who chanted, “You are no good and you never will be any good!” or a father who disdained his very existence as being unworthy of the family name, or a spouse who never really got to know her husband, or a daughter who preferred the silence of the tomb of sequestration and estrangement, or an aunt who charged a nephew with evil life decisions, or even a teacher who told a student “You will never pass this course or become what you dream of becoming!”…that plea/prayer will cascade onto the rocks, the beaches and the cliffs of the hearts, minds, spirits and souls of men until the “twelfth of never” (to borrow a phrase from Johnny Mathis’s hit).

And, whether it is or can be answered, depends more on the courageous pursuit of self-acceptance of every man based on a critical assessment of who he is, what he stands for, what he stands against and who he has become than on the extrinsic reward of acceptance by those who do not chose to get to know him fully and intimately.
And a theology that starts with a total and unconditional acceptance by God will and does go a long way to preparing a man’s psyche and soul for letting the  mystery of his sacredness (not his perfectionism!) into his heart.

Wednesday, December 11, 2019

#31 Men, agents of and pathway to cultural metanoia (education)

Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire. (W.B.Yeats)

As student, teacher, mentor and mentee, I have had the good fortune to walk on the shoulders of men and women who found something worth challenging in the fat kid sitting in a desk. I have also witnessed a reductionism about education’s value, complexity and importance in the infrequency and the superficiality of public debate about the topic. About much more than numbers of students in a classroom, and teachers’ salaries, the formal education process, funded in Canada for the most part by tax dollars, plants the seeds of a culture in one generation that will “flower” when those students become leaders.

Technology, the new wave, is not a panacea, although it does offer various windows into the students’ learning styles. Nevertheless, the ‘job market’ has and will continue to have an inordinate influence on what is taught and how it is taught, and labour trends are filled with projections of the need for all students to be able to use digital technology in whatever employment field they choose.  A culture that can be diagnosed as dependent on the senses, when compared with intuition (see Jung Personality Types), imagination and sensibilities, especially one that continues to tilt favourably in the direction of a male “hard-wiring” that investigates, diagnoses and fixes whatever is not working properly, will naturally take pride in installing, and then integrating the latest digital technology into all  corners of the curriculum.

“Literacy” no longer is or can be restricted to the capacity to read and write words, to infer from those words, and to imagine how to use words in various life situations. Literacy now integrates a proficient facility to use and preferable even to program software, as a pathway to successful sustainable integration into the labour market of the future. All of that said, there is still much to commend fathers, executives, thought and political leaders of both genders, to reflect on the subtle yet impactful nuances of what is going on in the classrooms of their children and their grandchildren.

Experiments, broad experiences, themed curricula, team projects, imaginative yet responsible evaluation processes and teachers who themselves have already been “fired-up” about their significance in the lives of their students, all comprise the broad “flow” of the river that runs through the education system. Budgets, accountabilities to political dictates, keeping statistical data on various ‘incident’ reports…these may be necessary as demographic benchmarks for public comparison and political justification, at local levels especially. Yet, it is reasonable and not merely rhetorical to inquire how many parents in any neighbourhood really know the teachers and their approaches for their own children. Education suffers from, and has to endure, a cultural reality: every citizen has personal, first-hand experience as a student, and in small communities, many of those experiences have been with the same teachers who now educate their children. It has been my experience that the ‘content’ of the curriculum does not evoke many inquiries (except for what a public considers illicit literature titles) while report card marks and remarks generate affect, both positive and negative from parents.

So, parents themselves, whether consciously or not, impose a kind of political veneer on their expression of their expectations on the school system. If results are “OK,” parents are generally happy; if not, questions about “why?” emerge. Teachers take risks, for example, if they inquire, at parents’ night, whether the family has dinner-table discussion, whether books are important in the home, whether kids spend X hours on social media while at home, whether travel is important to the family, whether student ambitions and dreams are known and fostered. “You are invading our private space!” would be the emotional, if not the verbal reaction to such questions. Except for the social media inquiry, I know because I have asked all of the other questions, to the chagrin of several unsuspecting and surprised parents. The culture of the home, nevertheless, is a fertile greenhouse for the nurture and weeding and flowering of young minds, imaginations and aspirations.

And, while fathers would acknowledge the truth of that relationship cognitively, they may not be as invested in the generation of the greenhouse culture as the mother of their children. “Sexist!” I hear some readers gasping. Not really, if we are to be frank and somewhat confrontative of the ways in which family culture develops. Sports scores, DOW and NASDAQ indices, weather, perhaps a neighbourhood event, potentially an athletic competition and an adolescent budget or plea for new shoes…these are some of the topics of conversation in which fathers engage. Of course, most will want to know if a child is unwell, behaving in a manner that draws attention because of its being off-centre, or having some conflict at school. The affect of the child, however, from my experience, remains more of an irritant to many fathers, and a matter better left to the ‘expertise’ of mothers.

It is in moments of “abdication” like these that it says here men are most needed. Their young son or daughter, (yes either and both genders!) need to hear what both parents are thinking, feeling, fearing, advising and warning. For starters, such explorations open each parent to the fullness of the other’s personality; and then, the child finds out “who” his/her parents really are. Unschooled in intimacy, for the most part, men feel inadequate when time comes to discuss the details of incidents, unless they have a criminal or bullying component. Men, generally, consider personal encounters of jealousy, gossip and mere adolescent competition to be issues to be resolved by the participants, unless and until the incident boils over, and that boil-point will be different for each adult male.

Another deferral pattern, having invaded athletic coaching, corporate training, professional development and even some parenting is what has traditionally been known as “classical conditioning”…that  Pavlovian “training” into appropriate behaviour through the application of rewards, thereby conditioning the “learner” into knowing what to do to evoke the reward. More recently, many counselling practitioners have tilted their practices to the CB model, cognitive-behavioural therapy. 

This approach teaches unhelpful thinking styles, among which are: shoulding and musting, overgeneralizations, emotional reasonings, catastrophizing, black and white thinking, jumping to conclusions, magnification and minimization, personalization. While such vocabulary may be appropriate band-aids useful for parents to offer at moments of tension with their adolescent children, parents, both fathers and mothers, need to be able to discern when a situation is a merely passing frustration and when it is more than that.

Far from becoming a therapist in the life of our family, fathers/husbands can strive to be fully present emotionally, intellectually, physically and spiritually in our families. Segregating out each "component" facet robs us and our families of our full truth, even if that truth is not as pretty as we would like. Detaching itself, fails everyone!

Here is a time when one generation can be and often is caught in the “imprint” of our own generation, when things we considered insignificant have now become much more significant, even traumatic. We do not necessarily have to agree with the change in relative importance; yet we do have to try to walk a few paces in the shoes of our son/daughter, in order to empathize with what they might be experiencing. Our fathers and mothers might have resorted to insults, shaming, and incidental demeaning comments, in an attempt to ‘bring him/her out of the funk’…Today, however, pressures on our kids are very different from those we experienced.

Counsellors’ files are filled with stories, especially of fathers, who simply do not “connect” with their/our children, especially at moments when the child considers that connection relevant and important. And such moments have to be anticipated, long before they arise. Reading to our very young children, for example, shooting hoops with a small basketball into a low basket, tossing a ball or frizzbee…stories about life as we once knew it…these may be considered by many a layer of nostalgic dust that could only suffocate a young child. It is the discernment, and the capacity to remain open to the “moment” when a considered comment, a hug, a touch, a smile or even an invitation to take a walk or have lunch might be ‘just what the doctor ordered’ as a moment to be present…to listen, to try to imagine the situation the kid experiences, to coach, and even to caution, depending on the moment and the issue.

One of the more troublesome issues, for which most fathers have not been coached or prepared is how, when and if to express expectations to adolescent sons and to daughters. Young mens’ stories fill the ethos about how fathers were/are unrealistic, excessively demanding, pressurizing their sons into activities in which they were less interested than the father, or generating an impression that the son will never “live up” to the standards expected by the father. Fathers seem more likely to take a more ‘gentle’ approach with daughters, whether from a natural leaning or perception of a deeper sensibility of the daughter. Another dynamic that fills the files of counsellors is the tension between adolescent daughters and their mothers. Here is a conundrum inside of a puzzle, inside of a set of twisting nerves for the father to know what to “do” if anything.

Avoiding playing the role of the “good guy” in comparison/competition with the ‘evil mother’ is a first thought. Some fathers need to be “best friends” with their children, as opposed to being an effective, mature, responsible and respected parent. And this “BFF” stereotype can apply to both mothers and fathers, at their and their child’s peril. Fathers also need to check their anxiety about speaking with their spouse, when they/we notice a deepening tension between mother and daughter. Without “taking the side” of the daughter, fathers can offer a listening ear and an open mind and heart to a spouse who is struggling with attitudes, behaviours, beliefs, relationships of her daughter. “Peace-making,” while it may be a dream-role, may not be an appropriate goal for the father to set for himself. These situations are often not immediately remediable; it might take months or even years to fully resolve.

What one parent can provide, however, for another who is engaged in a kind of negative drama with a child, is begin to open windows into what might be at the heart of the tension, from the parent’s perspective. Often, without conscious recognition, a parent may be re-visiting a traumatic moment, a death, a divorce, or some pivotal and painful moment from his/her life, that is being triggered by an incident, statement, gesture from the present. One father of an eight-year-old boy  was exerting pressure on his son, sufficiently strong to drive the son into the arms of his mother for comfort. When a family therapist suggested to the mother that father and son could work this out, and mother complied, the son’s question about why the father was being so “heavy” to his father prompted an aha moment for the father. He was eight when his father died, and he had not grieved his father’s death. That simple realization lifted the cloud from both father and son.

Men tend to disparage emotional upset, their own and their family member’s. Men also tend to minimize physical and emotional pain, their own and their family member’s. Tara Westover’s memoir, Educated, is one of the best/worst examples of a father’s disconnect from his society, and thereby from his children. Ms Westover’s doctoral graduation from Oxford, following what can only be diagnosed as a traumatic childhood for herself and her siblings, give testimony to the strength of the human spirit, and the resilience of the human imagination.

Fathers can offer support for the academic choices their children make, even if they/we do not agree with those choices. Knowing if and when to offer comment, knowing how much to intervene if at all, discerning the precise need of a child or a spouse…these moments depend primarily on a conscious awareness of his/our own feelings, perceptions, beliefs, aspirations and fears.

To detach from such intensive reflection, rationalized as unimportant, irrelevant, better left to some professional or a female spouse/daughter/parent/grandparent or simply beyond the limits of personal time and energy is to fail the self, as well as failing the spouse/daughter/son whose specific moment of ferment/torment can and will best be assuaged by a tender and loving moment with a sensitive father. Such detachment robs both father and “other” of a kind of intimacy which can be the seed and flower of a memory and a gift for each.

The “fire in our belly” will ignite a new curiosity, a new potential and a courage to risk exposure, even if such exposure is barely tentatively appreciated. And the hours our teachers invested in our “fire” will continue to light the pathway to a new generation of “fires” in the lives of our children and grandchildren.

Monday, December 9, 2019

#30 Men, agents of and pathway to cultural metanoia (enantiadromia)


One of the apparent issues in contemporary cultural discourse is the separation of stories of individuals from the group. In the first instance, the individual, our collective perspective looks through the telescope of the psychologist, the psychiatrist, or perhaps the entrepreneur. Only if and when a sufficient number of individuals comprise a “group” (or in our terms, a demographic) does that individual warrant consideration from the perspective of public policy. Although it is true that photos of individuals, for example, drowned on a beach on the shores of the Mediterranean, or a father and daughter on the banks of the Rio Grande generate considerable public grief, and potentially generate a new consciousness of various issues. In the two cases mentioned, those issues are migrant refugees from North Africa and migrant refugees from Central America.

Some have even attempted to discern whether the templates deployed in marriage counselling can be appropriately applied to the ‘divorce’ that seems to be taking place in the United States in order to restore the ‘union’ to something resembling political and constitutional health.

Segregation, division of labour, division of academic discipline, and the concomitant division of various “objectives and goals into departmental execution” as a matter of efficiency, seems to flow from a historic precedent based on military exploits, military organization, military hierarchy and a top-down construct of order, management and the execution of power. The church epitomizes the model in the Vatican, with the Pope. The theology exclusively written and practiced by men, adopts and fosters the model of colonization under the rubric of evangelizing. Rationalization dedicated to justification of the exclusion of women by men, and then accepted and tolerated and even obeyed by women, including reverend sisters, even more deeply embedded the hierarchical, pyramidal, male-ordered universe.

 Colonization, as a model of expansion of empires, institutions, corporations, and even schools of thought/discipleship has historically demeaned minorities on all continents, with impunity. Only unless and until those minorities rose up, found their voice, perhaps even took up arms, and resisted such colonial power, whether it was imposed over minority races, minority gender, minority faith groups, was that colonial leg-iron loosened or removed. In Canada, for example, the leg-irons attached to the multiple land treaties negotiated between the federal government and First Nations peoples, including the imposition of “reserves” as racial and ethic ghettoes, still impede the full development of individuals and communities across the country.

And, for well over a century, those leg-irons of colonization rarely if ever aroused the shame, guilt and need for change among the majority Caucasian population both French and English. Today, in 2019, over 300 reserve communities have boil water orders on their water supply, given the contamination of the water supplies, and the dangers to health of all adults and children. The right to vote, in the United States, for example, has been excluded from black citizens, from women under a mantra of white male power and political control for centuries, only shifting meagrely in the twentieth century. Voter repression of minorities, under a variety of means and methods, continues to this day, in many states ruled by Republican governors and state legislatures.

The men who pursue these nefarious goals and objectives, in order to preserve their own hold on power, exhibit a degree of narcissism, in direct contravention of  the highest aspirations and ideals of the American constitution. Personal performance of public office, in pursuit of private ambitions, needs and goals has been a feature of public life in North America for decades, called out briefly and intermittently, through court cases, journalistic investigative reporting, the occasional movie and television series. Similarly, in private corporations, mostly led and monitored by men, the pursuit of personal stock options has far too often taken precedence over the higher, ethical, moral and public trust issues implicit in the provision of goods and services to each respective client base. In the church, the university and the legal and medical institutions, too, such personal pursuit of self-aggrandizement by those in positions of power and responsibility has rendered its opposite the occasional exception. The interests of the “public” whether the client, the patient, the parishioner, or even the student, have invariably taken a back seat to the overt or covert ambitions of those in power.

Men, for centuries, have adopted a posture that has its own embedded opposite within. In pursuit of those personal self-aggrandizement goals, the corner office, the BMW, the stock options, the bishoprics, the CEO designations, the Chief of Surgery (add any of the many departmental options) have sabotaged their/our true selves, our ego’s, in an unconscious pursuit of what we thought and believed was a legitimate, ethical, moral and sustainable “career path”. In fusion our performance with our ego, our Persona/Mask with our ego, we have lost ourselves in our work. Whether that work generated large pay slips, monumental public reputations, peer adulation, audience applause or some combination of extrinsic rewards, we fell into a trap of feeding the monster of our performance objectives.

Perfect performance, measured by an increasingly comprehensive and complex indices, profits, sales, expansion of production, expansion of technologies, promotions, recognitions by peers who themselves had already subsumed their own ego’s to the “performance” mantra became not only the norm but also the mandate and measurement for success.

We even taught our sons and daughters that our pursuit of “success” was enviable,  worthwhile, and so persuasive that, if a son or daughter announced an intention to follow a “dream” to become an artist, a poet, a dancer, an actor, we immediately intoned the long chant of “responsibility, “You need to get a real job!” I know of a graduate from political science whose medical-specialist father reminded him, immediately upon his undergraduate graduation ceremony, “You still do not have a real profession; so, you need to study in a field that will provide one!

Effectively, many of us lost our true selves, our inmost and private interests, ambitions, skills and the culture that sustains those private identities, in pursuit of the homes, the vehicles, the vacations, the second homes, the social status and the public reputations that accompany such “trophies”.

We thereby effectively, if unconsciously, became tools, agents and pawns, not only of the systems for which we worked, but also for our own extrinsic persona and reputation. It is not argued here that such a “surrender” of our innate personalities was total; rather the degree to which we became enveloped in the pursuit of these extrinsic, measureable, publicly recognized and rewarded goals and objectives, often compromised not only our private persons; it also compromised those members of our families who found us pre-occupied with our work, or worse, absent in pursuit of work “duties”.

It is not surprising, in retrospect, to take note of such dynamics in the lives of millions of men, and increasing numbers of ambitious and “successful” women. Carl Jung wrote, decades ago, about the law of enantiadromia, borrowing from Heraclitus, the Greek philosopher of Ephesus who discovered a significant psychological law: “the regulative function of opposites…a running contrariwise, by which he meant that sooner or later everything runs into its opposite.” (Quoted by Frieda Fordham, An Introduction to Jung’s Psychology, p. 18, from Jung’s Two Essays on Analytical psychology)

For Jung, “the ego represents the conscious mind as it comprises the thoughts, memories, and emotions a person is aware of. The ego is largely responsible for feelings of identity and continuity. Persona is the public image of someone. The original word means mask, so the mask we wear in public in order to impose a certain image about us: father, mother, chief, artist, official, president. Persona is a result of social adaptation; it may be excessive, that is it may suggest a personality that has nothing natural but it is pure fiction. If the persona is excessive, then our authentic personality evanesces until it becomes practically unrecognizable.” (Jung Archetypes website)

It is the unconscious fusion of persona and ego that we are addressing here. And the question of whether men are more susceptible to this fusion than women will be best left to others more qualified. Suffice it to say, that from my own experience, and from the experience of other men whose lives I have observed, and even documented, our persona has too often subsumed our ego’s to our own detriment, if not tragedy.

Institutions designed and operated by men who suffer unconsciously and thereby without either remediative counsel or personal reflection from enantiandromia, are caught in a trap. We can argue all day that such a trap is of their/our own making and therefore others cannot accept responsibility for the impact. However, others, and that really means all others, who themselves “value” public performances over authentic personal expression, and the rewards such performance brings, (often designed to attract, seduce, induce and recruit the “best” performers) implicitly  underscore, support, and sustain the pursuit of extrinsic, public performance goals and objectives, at the expense of an authentic expression of the ego.

This surrender of the authentic self, naturally, undergirds the consumer-based equations that keep the North American economy fuelled, even super-charged as, like lemmings millions of men and women prop up our sense of ourselves (really our public performance, whether our public is our family, our peers, our neighbours, or our workplace colleagues) through acquisition of the goods and services whose brands fit our “image” of our successful self.

In a culture deeply drowning in denial of the ego, both its individual presence, and its collective presence, having surrendered to the dictates of performance, mask, in the Heraclitus’ perspective, the ego becomes its opposite, the mask. And if we are all marching to the same drummer, to the same image-making machine, fuelling the extrinsic measurements of our own collective success, like the GDP, the GNP, the DOW, the TSX, the NASDAQ, the unemployment numbers, without at the same time taking cognizance, real reflective consciousness of how we are sabotaging ourselves and our culture, how can we be shocked that our public discourse, and our public policy and more importantly the low ceilings of our collective aspirations and imaginations are suffering from the malaise in which we are all enmeshed.

Just yesterday, we learned that Iceland has dropped the GDP as a measure of the society’s success, and replaced it with a measurement of wellbeing. “Speaking at London’s Chatham House Think tank, last Tuesday, Iceland’s Prime Minister, Katrin Jakobsdottir says “governments should prioritise environmental and socials factors in their budgets instead of GDP, in an alternative future based on wellbeing and  inclusive growth. Iceland is part of the Wellbeing Economy Alliance, a network of countries and organizations developing frameworks to measure social economic and environmental factors in a way that allows countries to move beyond GDP as the sole marker for economic success.” (Andy Gregory, The Independent, Dec. 5, 2019)

While there is no guarantee that such a proposal will reduce or eliminate the possibility of enantiadromia, it is reasonable to speculate that a public consciousness of the dangers to demographic populations, as well as to individuals of the ravages ensuing from the fusion of ego and persona, can only foster a new awareness of the price many pay for surrendering to the performance of a role, and its many complex and even insidious obligations.

Personally, I write as one who pursued the applause of a public audience, in the classroom, the political arena, the media, and even in the church, to fill what I perceived to be a vacuum of value in my self. If I was not performing, at that at the highest level to which I could attain, I was not able to see myself as “successful” or even worthy, especially in the eyes of those who mattered like my family.

To them, and to all the others trapped in this snare, I seek forgiveness and offer a sincere apology. Knowing others who, in a similar entrapment, actually took their own lives, causing endless and tortuous pain, suffering, guilt and anger to those who loved them, I am conscious that I too inflicted pain and suffering on others who did not deserve that pain, guilt, shame and anger and anxiety. In the hope that primarily men, but also any women who can attest to their partner’s ensnarement, might take a step back from their enslavement to the public image of their performance, and ask themselves some tough questions about who they really are and how their lives comport with that authenticity, I scribble these words.

And I hope these words can be read and reflected upon in the spirit of humility, self-tolerance and self-forgiveness in which they are scribbled.

Sunday, December 8, 2019

#29 Men, gents of and pathway to cultural metanoia (hubris/fear)


A conversation on Morning Joe on MSNBC last week, evaluating Joe Biden’s aggressive response to an elderly Iowan male’s distorted criticism of his son’s working for a Ukrainian oil company linked to his disdain for Biden’s age and presumed incompetence displayed two opposing sides of the political landscape.

Two women on the set, Mika Brezinski and Katy Kay of the BBC, both disdained Biden’s ineffectual and tasteless response, while both Joe Scarborough and Eugene Robinson found it highly appropriate to the moment of the political climate in the  U.S.
Biden shouted down the man’s claim that he had influenced his son’s involvement in the oil company, challenged him to push-ups and then scorned him as “too old to vote for me” in the encounter.

The truth is, both the men (Scarborough and Robinson) and women (Brezinski and Kay) are valid, honourable, insightful and essentially worthy of respect in their analysis of the ‘hot’ moment on the campaign trail. The fact that Scarborough then went on to deride the women, and all other effetes, for their scorn of Biden’s “alpha male” response only adds to the political, cultural, social, and even ethical dilemma facing not only the U.S. but the western world.

Men are facing a perceived serious crisis of confidence in light of the kind of more nuanced, sensitive, moderate and far less pugilistic perceptions of those two women. And while this ‘war of the sexes’ has been going on for eons, the fact is that both genders have some room to give. Both genders also have some room to grow.

Dogs as family pets need and even depend on a kind of alpha male mentorship. Crises, like the one facing Great Britain and the allies in the Second World War, need an alpha male as was provided in spades by Winston Churchill. Emergency room doctors and nurses need a deep reservoir of the alpha male, tempered with Hemingway’s grace under fire when facing the latest gang-land shooting victim, or the most recent expectant mother in the middle of an unplanned and unexpected abortion. Military generals, in the heat of battle need the alpha male ‘command’ of both themselves and their various battle elements, both human and machine, as a steadying hand. Similarly, sea captains facing hurricane winds, fighter and commercial jet pilots facing nature’s worst storms, and space-ship captains facing malfunctioning rockets need a deep reserve of alpha-male strength, confidence, and nerves of steel in the moment of the crisis. Doctors in the operating room, when unexpected and life-threatening haemorages erupt need a similar menu of take-charge, can-do, heroic stretches beyond their basic training and experience.

It is in such moments, in all theatres, cabins, and crises that humans need, and observers respect, a dominant alpha-male-type response.

Heroes are born in such moments. And for many, such heroism becomes a kind of mystical mantra and guiding star for their lives. Many do pursue the moment of their dreams when they save a life, or when they score the winning goal in a championship game, or when they give birth under far less than healthy circumstances. Life stories and their time lines are often marked by such moments of heroic decision-making and even more admirable execution.

A ninety-five-year-old man whom I deeply admired for much more than his age delivered the most important story of his life, at a Christmas party, in a quiet corner of the room. He had, decades previously, flown small aircraft for various purposes. On a northern flight, he was asked to deliver a native woman in labour to the nearest medical station. Having accomplished this mission, however, the woman’s condition was too serious for that station to handle. Another flight in winter weather, in the dark of night to another medical station, ended with a similar result. Only after a third flight to another station was the woman adequately attended to and her child delivered. Of course, that pilot preserved the memories of that night in the deepest and most sacred sanctuary of his heart, as did that mother. The two later met and celebrated their horrific, challenging and ultimately life-giving and life-changing experience.

The depths of human capacity to endure, and to withstand severe complications, whether they be physical, emotional, intellectual, or spiritual are well documented, and celebrated in such commendations as sainthood, literary memoires, movies, military campaigns, political campaigns and news stories. Writers like Faulkner have celebrated the unextinguishable flame of the human spirit in his speech upon receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950.

However, this eternal flame of the human spirit has more than one dimension. It is not only displayed in heroic sensational and life-defying acts of bravery, self-control, strategic decision-making, or goal achievement. It is also honoured and celebrated in different circumstances, less noted in history, and less honoured in a culture in which certain stereotypes of the alpha-male type of heroism dominate.

Naturally, a male-dominated culture, including its history, its anthropology, its artistic and scientific achievements and its theological, legal and medical  premises will champion the masculine-characteristics of the heroic. The very notion of how to plow a field, based on the use of a plow exclusive to the men in the community, left other chores associated with feeding the family to the women. Physical strength, muscle and endurance of those muscles naturally played and continue to play, a significant role in determining cultural perceptions of the male-female collaboration and co-operation in early cultures.

On another front, care and organic understanding and appreciation of the human body, for example, men seemed both unaware and disinterested in their own physical and emotional pain, and actually defaulted on their own care and healing. Determined to carry out the required chores, duties, responsibilities of their lot and role, without regard to the dangers implicit in those activities, men have whether consciously or not, deferred to their more heroic attitudes of insouciance. Encouraged and cheered on by their ‘brother’s,’ men have disdained paying attention to their bodies, and their feelings and their psychological health from the beginning. Exceptions, of course, are found on the shelves of the archives of libraries in universities and hospitals and clinics, where the writings, research and speculations of many male prophets, poets, philosophers and scientists are recorded and preserved.

While men were accorded leadership roles in all institutions, women were not, as a matter of historical record. And the implications of that reality continue to vibrate all these many centuries since human history began. The ways in which men perceived, conceived, imagined and theorized about the nature of everything from God, to nature, to time, to enemies, to disease, to health and to happiness came to comprise the worldview, attitudes, philosophies, scientific and scholarly processes  approaches on which the world has based its many foundational principles and premises. The masculine world view, not mere the men who articulated it, has dominated how the world works from the beginning.

In the Christian world, the Garden of Eden story, an imaginary tale of first beginnings, posited a tension between man and woman, complete with an intervention by the snake. Culpability, as one implication, fell to the woman for the man’s eating the forbidden fruit. That debate has echoed throughout the ages, without a resolution, in spite of the volumes of print dedicated to that pursuit. Early cultures posited many deities, as their way of trying to explain and to relate to the mysteries of how plants grow, how seasons, moons, the earth and the universe works. And our recorded impressions, perceptions, attitudes and beliefs erupted like volcanoes from the minds, hearts, bodies and spirits of men. To an almost exclusive degree, women remained silent, absent and insignificant in the formation of how geophysical, geopolitical, ethical, medical, legal and theological insights developed. The degree to which that dynamic was deliberate, malignant and malicious is, and will continue to be, the source of much negative and contentious debate and conflict between men and women long into the twenty-first century. Whether male dominance, as malice, cancerous and thereby culturally toxic and lethal deserves its charge of crimes against humanity will continue to occupy lecture halls, seminar rooms and scholarly and popular writers for centuries. Male dominance, in all of its many roots and tentacles, however, cannot be denied.

It is this male dominance, even if considered honourable, responsible and mature, given the various epochs of history, and its many different faces and applications that has provided many benefits, insights and growth opportunities. It has also tragically excluded perceptions, attitudes, insights, imaginative visions and organic truths from the consciousness of the human species. Those contributions originating with the women on the planet, continue to be regarded with less honour, respect, dignity and authority than those of men, it says here, because men fear a kind of “defeat” if those different cultural attributes and perceptions were valued. Men, then, have been, are and will continue to be their (our) own worst enemies in the tension that continues to play out between men and women.

We cling to what we consider to be healthy masculinity at our own expense, and potential demise. And, as is clear to any sentient being, that demise could well include all of life on this planet as we know it. Given our contempt for anything that smacks of weakness, including our illnesses, our pains, our colds and fevers, and the doctors and nurses that can only serve us if they know the full truth of our conditions, we transfer that perception of fear of weakness and vulnerability to our planet, in our resistance to a full-and -open-minded orientation to the truth of global warming and climate change.

Given the masculine foundational roots of at least Christian theology, with a now single deity having replaced the panoply of deities of the Greeks, and with rules and traditions of obedience, loyalty and sacrifice to the deity, based on an exclusively masculine-conceived and delivered theology, we have debased that God as a critical parent, as an ethical snake that insinuates itself into each and every moral and ethical decision each of us make. Focussing on the daily opportunities/temptations of theft, lust, envy, murder and dishonouring parents, the decalogue has entrapped centuries of aspiring human beings in a narrow, personal, codified and punishable ethical and moral cage, from which each and every human’s daily life can be, has been and continues to be judged by those self-righteous, self-appointed, and self-anointed Christian purists. The fate of the planet and each person seeking and scratching out a chance for a heathy, honourable, worthy and dignified existence cannot even be envisioned by such a myopic theology and faith. Furthermore, the unconscious, insouciant dominant masculine fear of failure, defeat, loss of control, as absolutely linked to our obedience to God, has generated centuries of colonization in the name of that God, imprisonment of those whose lives counter our narrow, myopic and relentless pursuit of God’s favour and salvation, and the death of thousands of miscreants, without forgiveness, restitution and reconciliation, also one of the less prominent cornerstones of our purported faith.

In the process of two thousand years of propagation, dissemination, theorizing and praxis of the Christian theology, male dominated, male executed, male judicated, and male incarnated, we have collectively and individually participated in a kind of unnecessary, sabotaging and defeating cultural, political, ethical, and profoundly spiritual tragedy. We have entombed men in a straight-jacket of moral, ethical and psychological and spiritual enslavement and relegated the feminine to the edges of our “shared” culture. Both genders, thereby, have been reduced to a mere shadow of our respective potential, as has the gift of God also been squeezed into a mere performance of rituals, prayers, hymns, and balance sheets of fiscal, moral and ethical imprisonment to which no God worthy of the name ought to be relegated.

As one parishioner put it, “We are only attending church to reserve a place in heaven when we go!” to my utter shock! As another simplistic view of the faith put it by another parishioner, “Jesus was the first and best salesman in the world!”
It is the male, and thereby the human capacity and proclivity to simplify, reduce, and to attempt ultimately to control our life, our persons, and clearly our faith institutions by a variety of methods and approaches that lies at the root of our  undoing. We name and diagnose behaviour, attitudes and beliefs that we consider “acceptable,” “ethical,” “moral,” and “evil,” in ways that compromise our very existence. “Normal,” human behaviour, for example is segregated from “abnormal” behaviour in ways that no God worthy of the name would countenance. And then “abnormal” behaviour is classified as either “evil” or “sick.”

And on the basis of both of these categories, “evil,” and “sick” we design hierarchical rules, regulations, procedures and processes now commonly known as legal/judicial and medical respectively. In both of these “machines” the ultimate control is presumed to reside in “man” the ultimate of God’s creatures who, sadly and tragically, continues to perceive and conceive of his capabilities, skills and potential as in the image of God, “imago dei”. Sadly, it says here, this is and has always been an inversion of the “imago dei” to which it refers.

Man, and women, too, are least like God in being heroic, alpha-males, in complete control of the impending doom. Nevertheless, it is the male conception of heroic discipleship that continues to abound and impound its adherents. Ironically, paradoxically, and potentially lethally, when “man” opens to the gift and the freedom of vulnerability, incompleteness, ambiguity, the need for help and guidance, not only on an intellectual basis, but on an moral, ethical, global and spiritual basis, (and such guidance and support is only available from the feminine), then God’s presence can become potentially appreciated. It is not that women have better information than men; it is more that women have a much more organic and visceral connection and relationship to the universe, to each other, and potentially to God, a long-abused potential. And only if and when men open to the conscious gift of our “androgyny,” and the more accessible truths in attitudes, perceptions, philosophies, theologies and healing approaches innate to women that we might open the potential not only of planetary survival, but also to the truth of our own masculine self-sabotage in our relentless pursuit of extrinsic, sensate and valueless symbols of power and status.

The recent “veering” of the business community to “forming relationships” with its customers and clients, notwithstanding, as a merely transactional tactic in pursuit of sales, profits and investor dividends. It merely puts a mascara of transactional  vernacular on what could be a far more intrinsic, authentic, and integral relationship between humans with each other, with the planet and with God. Examples of such unity, harmony and connectivity with the universe, the planet, and with God can also be found among native communities whose respect for the Great Spirit in all aspects of their lives models a kind of reverence, humility and survivalist faith that the west can only aspire to emulate.

God is patiently waiting, listening, praying offering hope in our shared blindness and hubris.