The Art of Manliness - July 31, 2025


#527： Father Wounds, Male Spirituality, and the Journey to the Second Half of Life


Episode Stats

Misogynist Sentences

11

Hate Speech Sentences

19


Summary

Richard Rohr is a Franciscan friar, author, and ministering to those who are incarcerated and leading male initiation rituals and retreats. He has written several books about spirituality, particularly about male spirituality. In this episode, we discuss the differences between male spirituality and female spirituality, why church doesn t appeal to men, and what fathers can do to help their sons embrace the spiritual side of life.


Transcript

00:00:00.000 I'm Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.
00:00:11.160 How does the way men experience spirituality differ from the way women engage it?
00:00:14.580 What obstacles, particularly keep men, from experiencing greater meaning in their lives?
00:00:17.880 What paradigm shifts help them find it?
00:00:19.760 My guest today has been thinking about these questions over the six decades he's served
00:00:22.720 as his Franciscan friar.
00:00:24.300 His name is Richard Rohr, and he's authored numerous books and devoted a significant part
00:00:27.500 of his vocation to working with men, both ministering to those who are incarcerated and leading
00:00:31.920 male initiation rituals and retreats.
00:00:33.880 If you enjoyed my discussion last month with David Brooks about life's first and second
00:00:37.460 mountain, you'll want to listen to this episode.
00:00:39.380 Father Rohr has long taught the same concept, arguing that life is divided into a first and
00:00:43.280 second half.
00:00:44.100 We begin our discussion by exploring the differences between these two halves and what it takes
00:00:47.440 to move to the second half of life, including embracing non-dualistic thinking.
00:00:51.260 We also talk about what prevents men from maturing into the second half of life, including having
00:00:55.480 father wounds.
00:00:56.420 We then discuss how male spirituality differs from female spirituality, why church doesn't
00:01:00.680 appeal to men, the male need for initiation, and what it means to do shadow work.
00:01:04.740 We end our conversation with what fathers can do to help their sons embrace the spiritual
00:01:08.220 side of life.
00:01:09.180 After the show's over, check out our show notes at aom.is slash Rohr.
00:01:12.940 It's R-O-H-R.
00:01:23.140 All right, Father Richard Rohr, welcome to the show.
00:01:26.420 It's very good to be with you.
00:01:28.380 Thank you.
00:01:28.980 So you are a Franciscan friar who has written several books about spirituality, particularly
00:01:35.840 male spirituality, and I'd like to talk a bit about that today.
00:01:39.100 But before we do, let's talk about your background a bit.
00:01:42.640 What drew you to become a Franciscan?
00:01:45.440 And then how did you end up focusing on working with men in their spirituality?
00:01:49.920 You know, when I was a very young, idealistic man, growing up in flat, old Kansas, I made
00:02:00.140 the mistake of reading A Romantic Life of St. Francis.
00:02:05.080 And he is a very romantic figure.
00:02:08.180 Seems to appeal to everybody.
00:02:10.980 I'm told he has the longest listing in the Smithsonian Library.
00:02:16.460 And that certainly happened to me.
00:02:19.540 And then it just so happened that a Franciscan in his lovely brown robe came to our parish
00:02:26.720 and gave me an address to write to.
00:02:31.280 And that began this whole journey, 60-some years ago.
00:02:36.640 And then with that, how did you start working with men and their spiritual needs?
00:02:44.200 Well, you know, one of the, if not the first retreat I gave as a young priest in Cincinnati
00:02:51.780 in 1972 was to a group of young jocks coming from a high school where a retreat was required.
00:03:02.280 They didn't really want to attend, but they had to, to graduate.
00:03:07.480 I preached to them on the classic prodigal son story.
00:03:13.200 And to say the least, the response was overwhelming.
00:03:18.000 And over the years then, I quickly became aware of how many young men, not just in Cincinnati,
00:03:26.300 but eventually in the many other countries I got to teach in, suffered from what we call the father wound.
00:03:35.860 That again and again, it appeared that the male of the species does not know how to hand on himself to his sons.
00:03:48.400 It's either power, rivalry, sometimes downright abuse, verbal or even physical.
00:04:00.080 Sometimes it's just emotional unavailability or the father having been killed in war or dying young.
00:04:09.760 But then when I became the chaplain at the jail out here in Albuquerque, where I've lived for 32 years now,
00:04:19.020 then it became obvious to me that this pattern was universal.
00:04:24.960 I don't think I, in my 14 years there, I don't think I counseled or dealt with a man, honestly, who had a good father.
00:04:35.900 It was like the one predictable quality that I found in men, which seemed to lead them to a life of aimlessness.
00:04:48.080 Let's just call it that.
00:04:50.320 So I knew I had to study, understand what were the patterns at work here.
00:04:58.560 And that's when I began to make my first CDs 30 years ago.
00:05:04.220 Well, they were cassettes then, I guess.
00:05:07.480 And then they became retreats and conferences.
00:05:12.180 Well, we'll talk about more, delve more into detail about the father wound and male spirituality.
00:05:16.680 But before we do, let's talk about some of your big picture ideas, because that carries over into your work with male spirituality.
00:05:23.700 So, for example, in your book, Falling Upward, you make the case that there are two halves of life.
00:05:30.460 And you see that, too, in your work with men.
00:05:32.560 You talk about men have two halves of their life.
00:05:34.800 What are those two halves of life?
00:05:38.420 Well, admittedly, it's oversimplified.
00:05:41.880 But I'm amazed how that particular book of all my books is a consistent good seller.
00:05:49.600 And I can only think that it's naming something that's true to life experience.
00:05:56.980 I got the phrase itself from Carl Jung, the Swiss psychologist, who said there are two major tasks of life.
00:06:07.740 The first is, as he put it, where you create your container.
00:06:13.300 I call that your identity, your persona, your self-image.
00:06:22.540 Probably it amounts to your education, your family situation, if you become a husband or a father, or whatever it is.
00:06:32.020 But that's your delivery system, as Bill Plotkin puts it.
00:06:38.600 And I find that to be true.
00:06:40.300 Now, the point I make later in the book, I'm going to make it quicker here, is that in non-wisdom cultures, and I'm afraid we are a non-wisdom culture,
00:06:55.860 the task of the first half of life becomes the only task.
00:07:00.680 It's succeeding, climbing, naming oneself as successful, and most don't know that there's a second task.
00:07:12.880 Now, if you read the book, you saw that I drew upon the classic Greek myth of the Odyssey to show that this is not a new issue.
00:07:22.980 But that the way you move from the first half to the second half of life is usually from some event that, again, Carl Jung would call necessary suffering.
00:07:40.180 It has to happen.
00:07:42.080 You have to fail.
00:07:43.440 Your first salvation project has to disappoint you.
00:07:49.800 And you have to see, my gosh, this is not the whole picture.
00:07:54.800 This is not enough.
00:07:56.980 Maybe it's a death in the family.
00:07:59.400 Maybe it's the failure of your marriage.
00:08:02.300 Maybe it's facing an addiction.
00:08:04.920 Maybe it's your sexuality.
00:08:06.480 But something in almost every myth, fairytale, story, and spiritual teaching, including the four Gospels, there has to be a falling apart.
00:08:21.820 And that's the transition to the second half of life.
00:08:25.860 So I'll say it very quickly.
00:08:28.360 Basically, if the first half of life is building the container, the second half of life is finding the contents that the container was meant to hold.
00:08:42.840 What is my education for?
00:08:45.920 What is my self-image, my money, my reputation for?
00:08:52.100 What was I born to do?
00:08:53.960 Bill Plotkin, one of our good teachers in our men's work, he calls the task of the first half of life, your survival dance.
00:09:05.320 And he calls the task of the second half of life, your sacred dance.
00:09:11.820 And we both experience, after years of working with men, that a rather high percentage in a secular culture like ours never get to their sacred dance.
00:09:28.060 Because they just keep doing the task of the first half of life over and over and over again.
00:09:35.800 And that's certainly true in Christianity, too, why we have so much immature religion.
00:09:44.200 So that's it in a nutshell.
00:09:46.280 And I do mean a nutshell.
00:09:48.760 It is a nutshell.
00:09:49.400 There's a lot more to dig in there and falling upward.
00:09:51.980 Yeah, I mean, when I read that, I resonated with it because that first half of life framework, I've been there.
00:09:59.620 Like, it's always constantly striving.
00:10:01.440 You think there's going to fulfill you.
00:10:02.840 But then you lie in bed at night and you're like, man, is this all there is?
00:10:07.020 Is this it?
00:10:08.400 Who am I now?
00:10:09.560 Who am I now?
00:10:10.120 Who am I now?
00:10:10.800 Right.
00:10:11.120 Yeah.
00:10:11.660 And then you have to go to that second half of life.
00:10:13.660 And it's hard to do.
00:10:14.700 It's especially in a culture where everything is geared towards that first half, towards striving.
00:10:20.060 Frankly, Brett, you don't go there.
00:10:23.240 You have to be pushed there.
00:10:25.640 You have to be led there.
00:10:28.120 No one goes there willingly.
00:10:29.780 Again, your first attempt at life has to disappoint you.
00:10:37.560 So you see, our American idea of progress doesn't work too well with growing up men because it makes you deny failure.
00:10:49.360 Unless you're in something like a 12-step program or something similar, we pretty much don't know there is a second half of life.
00:11:02.900 And one thing you also talk about in Falling Upward is sort of the thinking that shades these two different parts of life.
00:11:10.240 In the first half of life, you say it's very dualistic.
00:11:13.280 Yes.
00:11:13.680 And then in the second half of life, you shift to a non-dualistic frame of mind.
00:11:18.460 Can you walk through that?
00:11:20.120 Sure.
00:11:20.600 You know, the word non-dual is somewhat new to most Western people.
00:11:27.260 Now, if we had been raised in the East, Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, all take non-dual thinking as normative, as a descriptor for the enlightened person.
00:11:41.680 And what that means is he or she does not think in either or, all or nothing, you know, where you divide reality into simple binary opposites, and you make a choice.
00:11:58.680 And not only do you make a choice that one is better than another, but you really hold on to it rather tightly.
00:12:08.560 It's non-rational.
00:12:10.540 It doesn't fit logic.
00:12:13.820 It doesn't make sense.
00:12:15.360 It's against the evidence.
00:12:17.480 But that's how strongly the ego needs to define itself and defend itself.
00:12:25.440 And that does not serve the growing up process very well.
00:12:30.740 And you also talk about that you reach a point when you're in that second half of life, you're able to, like, you call this an okayness with the tragic nature of life.
00:12:39.560 Like, you're able to recognize life is hard and sad, but also it's joyous.
00:12:43.260 And that's another form of non-dualistic thinking.
00:12:46.600 Excellent that you come right to that.
00:12:50.360 Because the paradigm, you know, in Christian theological language, we call it death and resurrection.
00:12:58.480 But everybody just talked about this as something Jesus went through.
00:13:03.520 And we sort of worshipped it in Jesus.
00:13:07.240 Thank you for dying for us.
00:13:08.980 Thank you for rising.
00:13:11.100 And most people didn't have a clue, it seems to me, that they were talking about the whole human journey for all of us, not just Jesus.
00:13:22.360 And that made it rather ineffective, that we've got to hold death and resurrection, failure and success together at the same time, as two sides of the same coin.
00:13:37.700 For most Western people who aren't trained in thinking with paradox, they have to be taught.
00:13:47.120 They really have to be taught non-dual thinking.
00:13:50.880 And they resist it, usually until something forces them.
00:13:58.000 Their own failure, their own face very often needs to be pushed into the mud to say, my gosh, it's true.
00:14:06.260 And I can still be happy.
00:14:09.040 You have to know it experientially.
00:14:11.320 It can't just be a Sunday sermon or a book on psychology.
00:14:17.500 Yeah, that's a good point.
00:14:18.440 I was talking to David Brooks the other day about this idea of kind of going into that deeper.
00:14:24.540 And he's noticed with his college students that he teaches, they treat like this, what we call the second half of life, like a school project.
00:14:32.580 They're like, well, okay, I did the first half.
00:14:35.240 Now it's time to go to those.
00:14:36.520 So tell me what I need to do.
00:14:37.680 And it's like, well, that's not how it works.
00:14:40.180 Yeah, David is a friend.
00:14:41.440 And we find ourselves thinking the like on a lot of subjects.
00:14:46.540 I think with greater poetry, he's calling it the two mountains and writes about it very well.
00:14:54.920 And so, okay, you said that you have to be drawn into the second half of life.
00:14:59.880 Yes, or pushed.
00:15:01.480 Or pushed in.
00:15:02.240 Or fall into it.
00:15:03.500 Or fall, right?
00:15:04.300 I mean, if we want to get biblical, right, there's a falling and there's always a rising up.
00:15:08.620 Yes, that's right.
00:15:10.000 But what does that fall have to look like?
00:15:14.060 Does it have to be something tragic, a big setback, like a divorce or a death or a cancer scare?
00:15:20.380 Or can that suffering be more subtle?
00:15:24.480 For the male, it normally takes a whomp on the side of the head because the male psyche is so defended against change, about being powerful and superior.
00:15:37.760 Now, that's why most cultures developed some practice of initiation rites.
00:15:45.360 For all of history, we're the exception to that.
00:15:49.360 The male had to be taught how to descend into powerlessness because he would not go there naturally.
00:15:58.720 Little subtle taps, unless he's a young man who's very sensitive, and there are some.
00:16:06.020 Most of us demand some humiliation to our ego, some maybe just discovering that we lied and our reputation is ruined.
00:16:21.540 You know what I mean?
00:16:22.180 But it does have to be, in my experience, a whomp on the side of the head.
00:16:29.020 It can't just be little gentle nudges because we'll dismiss them and maintain our self-image as superior, separate, in control, right.
00:16:43.480 And, you know, here I am a priest, but I don't think religion has helped people in this very much at all.
00:16:50.940 We just gave them another reason to be right.
00:16:54.700 And we haven't done our work very well at all in that regard.
00:17:00.920 Why do you think men need that whomp?
00:17:03.660 Like, what is it, why do they, why do we think men are very, they're trying to protect the ego?
00:17:08.300 What is it different about men than women?
00:17:11.220 Well, you know, these historical biologists, I don't know if that's the right word,
00:17:17.820 but they say with some understanding that the history of humanity has been a history of war.
00:17:27.300 And the male's role was to go off and fight war.
00:17:31.660 If men saw their vocation as that of a warrior, which is only one of the classic male archetypes, king, warrior, lover, and wise man,
00:17:45.020 you can see, you know, we now have a word for it.
00:17:48.920 We call it PTSD, where the man just closes down.
00:17:54.580 Life is so absurd.
00:17:57.000 Life is so tragic.
00:17:58.960 I don't know how to process it.
00:18:01.840 And I, especially if I come back a loser in the war.
00:18:08.120 One thing that you talked about in your book,
00:18:09.920 why men are probably more drawn to that first half of life mentality that stuck out to me.
00:18:16.840 And it also relates to something another, it was a Jesuit priest wrote, his name is Walter Ong.
00:18:22.240 He wrote a book called Fighting for Life.
00:18:24.540 And he talked about men in competition and kind of relating to literature.
00:18:29.060 And he said that one thing that makes men different from women is that
00:18:33.020 men are different from their mothers, right?
00:18:35.860 They have to actually create an identity separate from their mom.
00:18:40.400 And you talk about that in your book.
00:18:42.300 Yes, that's a good point.
00:18:43.680 We begin by defining ourselves as not.
00:18:49.100 Because we are so enmeshed with our mother.
00:18:53.360 I am not my mother.
00:18:56.120 So if that becomes your stance, defining yourself by opposition to, it becomes your stance.
00:19:04.960 Yes, I'm glad he said that.
00:19:07.800 So again, that's all about creating the ego.
00:19:10.000 And that's healthy.
00:19:11.320 As you talk about, this first half of life isn't bad.
00:19:14.220 Yes, yes.
00:19:15.400 But at a certain point, you have to move to that second half of life.
00:19:18.120 Well, let's go back to this idea of father hunger and father wounds.
00:19:21.960 What do you think is the source of that?
00:19:23.720 Like, why is it that men have such a hard time connecting with their sons and teaching them
00:19:31.800 how to be, you know, generative men, men who give, men who give life?
00:19:37.140 Well, let me start with this.
00:19:38.400 And it's obvious in many ways.
00:19:40.280 You can't give away what you yourself don't have.
00:19:45.220 And so many men who've talked to me over the years, they discovered that it at least went
00:19:52.560 back to their grandfather, that their grandfather was not a very generative man.
00:19:59.140 He didn't know how to give himself.
00:20:01.580 Or if he did, he only learned it in his later years.
00:20:05.900 But while he was raising his father, he was pretty hands-off, didn't communicate emotions
00:20:14.700 or touch or meaning or love.
00:20:20.360 We, in our trade-off of gender roles, we thought that was the job of the mother.
00:20:27.460 And certainly until my time, those gender roles were pretty clear in most cultures.
00:20:36.260 Certainly in ours.
00:20:38.040 And the father was most of the time not involved in the raising of the children, particularly
00:20:46.640 the son.
00:20:48.000 Well, going back, okay, so you have this father wound because your father just wasn't able
00:20:52.580 to express a love to you.
00:20:54.400 What's the result of that?
00:20:55.720 How does that keep men focused in that first half of life for the rest of their life?
00:21:02.720 Boy, it's real.
00:21:03.940 It's just real.
00:21:05.000 They keep looking for the perfect boss, the perfect coach.
00:21:11.420 When they find he isn't perfect and none of us ever are, again, here's all or nothing
00:21:18.180 dualistic thinking.
00:21:19.560 They go through a huge disappointment and very often totally reject that very same man.
00:21:28.540 They have to have, who was it that wrote the book on the good enough mother?
00:21:33.480 And where I often see it is in this idealization of a manhood that doesn't exist, this almost powerlessness in
00:21:57.500 the presence of a strong man, the need to please him, to have his favor, it's totally irrational.
00:22:09.620 This can be with men with two PhDs.
00:22:14.240 And I guess I have experienced it now.
00:22:17.780 I've been a priest for 49 years.
00:22:20.280 And, of course, we Catholics give ourselves the title father.
00:22:25.740 We're just asking for it, that projection of the perfect father.
00:22:31.540 And if you can be a kind and loving man, it works.
00:22:39.740 But then people want more from you than you can ever fulfill.
00:22:45.720 But you also have great power to heal.
00:22:48.740 A little bit goes a long way.
00:22:51.880 One sincere pat on the back, affirmation.
00:22:56.500 I've had guys come back to me just saying,
00:22:59.920 Father, I floated all day after you said that to me.
00:23:03.220 And, again, it has nothing to do with logic.
00:23:07.140 The need is on the non-rational brain stem, low lizard brain level,
00:23:15.940 where if that touch, affirmation, validation is not given to a boy before the age of five,
00:23:25.880 that he can feel it, feel it, he's forever wanting it.
00:23:33.220 From one father figure after another.
00:23:36.900 And when he doesn't get it, he becomes the angriest of all.
00:23:42.380 The young boys on the streets of America who hate every authority figure.
00:23:49.420 You just want to cry because this policeman is not your problem.
00:23:55.080 You really don't need to hate him.
00:23:57.460 No, there are certainly some police who have mistreated plenty of people.
00:24:01.960 But most of them want to be good authority figures.
00:24:06.380 I would like to think, I assume, but they've got three strikes against them already.
00:24:13.920 Because into the father wound, who was it said this?
00:24:19.520 Maybe that was young too.
00:24:21.720 Demons flee into the father wound.
00:24:25.380 And antagonistic, fear-based, I'll never let any man deal with me again.
00:24:35.880 I saw that in the jail when I would try to help some guys.
00:24:41.260 They wouldn't allow me to.
00:24:43.520 They're so afraid of being hurt again.
00:24:46.360 It breaks your heart, really.
00:24:48.040 We're going to take a quick break for your word from our sponsors.
00:24:51.840 And now back to the show.
00:24:54.100 So that father hunger, that father wound that occurs in childhood, basically leads men to looking for male love in other places.
00:25:02.760 That's right.
00:25:03.740 That's right.
00:25:04.160 Yeah, you said in the extreme form, that's, you know, can lead men to join gangs.
00:25:08.780 Like they're looking for male love, right?
00:25:11.900 Yeah.
00:25:12.700 And a male who's strong, which is why they will give their whole life to the jefe, the boss, the guy who's the leader of the gang.
00:25:23.900 He is a surrogate father, and they'll die for him.
00:25:29.920 You know, when I first wrote my early book on the male journey, I don't even think it's out in English anymore.
00:25:39.060 This was the early 80s.
00:25:41.140 It was translated into German.
00:25:44.600 And I went to book tour through the length of Germany.
00:25:49.740 And I can still remember coming into the great cathedral in Nuremberg.
00:25:56.220 And my mouth fell open because I wasn't well known then.
00:26:01.780 But it was filled with men from back to front, sitting in the aisles, sitting in the sanctuary.
00:26:10.940 I was extremely well received.
00:26:14.020 And then I opened it up to question and answer.
00:26:16.920 And one young man stood up in the middle of the great cathedral, spoke with rather good English, and said,
00:26:26.560 Father, we thank you for coming here today.
00:26:30.620 And he spread his arms out.
00:26:32.960 And he said, we are the grandsons.
00:26:36.540 We are the sons without fathers.
00:26:40.240 We killed all of our grandfathers in the First World War.
00:26:45.360 We killed all of our fathers in the Second World War.
00:26:51.200 And that's why we're filling this church today.
00:26:54.600 We don't know how to do it.
00:26:57.920 Oh, my God.
00:26:59.280 You could have heard a pin drop.
00:27:01.960 But he was right.
00:27:03.300 And my men's workbooks over the year continued to sell extremely well in Germany to this day.
00:27:13.180 Part of it's I have a German last name.
00:27:15.700 Maybe that's the reason.
00:27:17.440 But the bravado, the authoritarianism we associate, rightly or wrongly, with the German-speaking people,
00:27:30.100 is an overcompensation, in my opinion, for, in fact, being a wounded little boy who doesn't feel strong,
00:27:41.480 doesn't know himself, so he wears a persona.
00:27:47.440 And this same young boy said to me,
00:27:50.860 we needed a father so bad that we chose a bad father.
00:27:57.180 It's better to have a bad father.
00:27:59.340 And, of course, everybody knew he was talking about Adolf Hitler.
00:28:02.940 It's better to have a bad father than no father at all.
00:28:08.560 And, you know, we have to look at this today with the emergence of strong men all over the world as heads of state.
00:28:19.500 The political implications are huge.
00:28:23.400 People who don't know who they are, I would say in God.
00:28:28.240 I know most people don't need it to be said that way.
00:28:31.640 But in some objective way, they don't hold their identity.
00:28:37.840 They will be very attracted to strong men.
00:28:42.560 Because they want some sort of father.
00:28:44.680 That's it.
00:28:45.940 That's it.
00:28:47.740 Well, let's talk about non-dualistic thinking here.
00:28:52.660 This is going to be some non-dualistic thinking.
00:28:55.280 So, at the same time, you argue, okay, everything's sort of one-encompassed, right?
00:28:59.740 But at the same time, you say that there are differences between male spirituality and female spirituality.
00:29:07.000 And you're able to accept those two things at the same time, right?
00:29:09.440 So, it's non-dualistic.
00:29:10.700 There are no differences, but there are differences.
00:29:12.980 Very good.
00:29:13.720 Yeah.
00:29:14.660 You understand well.
00:29:16.300 Thank you.
00:29:16.920 Right.
00:29:17.200 How would you describe male spirituality?
00:29:20.840 Like, how would you describe it?
00:29:22.580 How is it different from female spirituality?
00:29:25.920 You know, don't let this be an absolute.
00:29:28.060 It's just based on my years of giving retreats.
00:29:32.220 And males seem to need, you know, like we're attracted to action movies.
00:29:38.660 We need a drama in which we can find ourselves.
00:29:44.600 It needs to be story-based, ritual-based in a way that ancient initiation rites were.
00:29:55.200 It can't just be the lecture method.
00:29:58.160 If you want to fill up a room, offer a lecture, and women will fill up the room.
00:30:05.120 They love to be talked to.
00:30:07.800 They love to talk to one another.
00:30:10.440 They love story, too.
00:30:12.760 But they love to share their feelings and their experience.
00:30:17.580 Forgive me.
00:30:18.140 I know this is an overgeneralization.
00:30:21.620 But I'm just trying to get to what does seem to be different.
00:30:25.920 We men are reticent to know our feelings or to share our feelings until we felt them.
00:30:34.300 And so some kind of ritual, drama, pulls us inside of that in a way that we can't deny it.
00:30:45.000 So that's why so many of the men's movements in our country have rediscovered storytelling, myth, legend, journeys, pilgrimages, movement, action.
00:31:02.180 And he needs to know something on the body level, not just the lecture level.
00:31:10.560 And I think, again, here's where Christianity, because that's the world I mostly moved in, has really missed the point.
00:31:18.280 Once we put the pulpit right in the center of the church, we, in effect, lost most men.
00:31:27.620 Unless it could be presented in an argumentative debate way.
00:31:33.880 I'm right and you're wrong.
00:31:35.240 But just a wisdom way, even to this day, wisdom lectures are not attended that much by most men.
00:31:47.160 It's sort of sad to have to admit that.
00:31:50.680 Yeah, we've had...
00:31:51.240 So it's...
00:31:52.460 I was going to say, I mean, we had a guest on the podcast talking about how churches have a man problem.
00:31:57.460 They're not coming to church.
00:31:58.660 And it's unique to Christianity.
00:32:01.260 It's not so much in Judaism or Islam.
00:32:03.880 What do you think churches are doing wrong?
00:32:05.480 So is it part of it that just...
00:32:06.620 Is it...
00:32:07.220 Are they catering churches towards female spirituality more than male spirituality?
00:32:12.640 Well, that'd be one way of saying it, Brett.
00:32:15.600 I think we've made it too nice.
00:32:18.680 Too pretty.
00:32:19.700 I mean, I can only pick on us Catholics.
00:32:23.800 All the vestments and the candles and the fancy words instead of real words.
00:32:31.940 The sitting in pews.
00:32:33.920 It's all order.
00:32:36.160 And when there's too much order, certainly the man still building his tower, who's in the first half of life, he likes order.
00:32:45.180 But to keep a man growing, you have to introduce him to disorder.
00:32:51.640 And that's what women love to talk about.
00:32:54.700 Wounding and healing and addiction and problems and marriage problems.
00:33:00.800 But we don't like to talk about that.
00:33:03.620 It's really strange.
00:33:06.520 It's either order or nothing.
00:33:09.620 So we come to church.
00:33:12.860 We're given that order.
00:33:14.220 But then it doesn't feel honest to us.
00:33:19.000 So we leave altogether.
00:33:21.980 The background from which I'm speaking, Brett, is one of my major paradigms.
00:33:27.900 It's in my last book, The Universal Christ.
00:33:31.680 Is this.
00:33:33.780 Picture three boxes.
00:33:35.700 Order, disorder, reorder.
00:33:38.580 In one language or another, that's taught by all the religions of the world.
00:33:45.800 You start with order.
00:33:47.960 With your first big explanation.
00:33:51.000 To come to wisdom, you have to integrate disorder.
00:33:55.860 Not excluded.
00:33:57.360 Not projective.
00:33:59.360 And we have not been good at that at all.
00:34:02.740 Integrating disorder.
00:34:04.720 Church was defined as conformity.
00:34:08.720 Only when you can put order and disorder together and see how they both work, do you have reorder.
00:34:17.740 Most churches don't know how to do that.
00:34:22.520 So the male loses respect for that.
00:34:25.380 I don't think it's a conscious process.
00:34:29.660 It's largely unconscious.
00:34:31.620 But he knows, and he's right, this is not real.
00:34:36.660 This is not true.
00:34:40.920 And in my experience, the largest percent of men come to that around the issues of sexuality.
00:34:49.080 Our black and white teaching on sexuality led most men to feel condemned, lost, evil, bad, oversexed, going to hell.
00:35:04.220 I don't have a chance.
00:35:05.420 So we just haven't done our homework very well.
00:35:10.980 Well, continue on that idea of this order, disorder, and reorder.
00:35:15.620 You know, something you talk about throughout your books, too.
00:35:18.040 The secular world sort of has gotten caught up in postmodernism where it's all about disordering, right?
00:35:23.720 Sort of taking order.
00:35:24.540 That's right.
00:35:24.980 But they haven't moved on to reordering.
00:35:27.980 Well, that's because they refused to respect what was good about order.
00:35:33.200 Do you see?
00:35:34.740 It's the whole putting the two together.
00:35:38.200 Yeah.
00:35:38.900 Very good.
00:35:39.920 Yeah.
00:35:40.100 Like single-issue voting is our new form of dualistic thinking, that we're allowed to be, you know, just choose sides instead of seeing the good that's on both sides, which is order.
00:35:58.960 I started out whatever you started, Democrat or Republican.
00:36:03.560 Now I can see, well, let's be honest with ourselves.
00:36:07.980 Some of what the other side is saying is true.
00:36:12.120 That's very hard for the male ego.
00:36:14.720 Today, the female ego seems to be almost as trapped, unless she has suffered.
00:36:22.540 So you've probably heard me say, the two normal paths of spiritual transformation are great love and great suffering.
00:36:30.920 If you succeed at avoiding great love of anything or anybody and great suffering for what you say you love, you'll stay in the first half of life forever.
00:36:45.820 You'll stay in a false order.
00:36:49.440 It's not really order at all.
00:36:51.500 So reorder is precisely holding on to what's good about order.
00:36:56.280 Like, I'm still a Catholic priest.
00:36:59.840 I mean, all the garbage I know about the Catholic Church, I probably know more history than you do.
00:37:06.940 But that's not the issue anymore.
00:37:09.760 I'm not looking for a perfect anything.
00:37:13.480 What dominates, I hope, is compassion, forgiveness.
00:37:17.860 I know about the disorder, and I still choose to love.
00:37:22.340 If you're a married man, you've already gone through the same thing.
00:37:27.440 If your marriage has lasted seven years or even three years, you know that your wife isn't perfect.
00:37:35.560 And yet, darn it, I love her.
00:37:38.620 That's maturity.
00:37:40.580 And again, it's that non-dualistic thinking, being able to be okay with both.
00:37:44.500 That's right. That's right.
00:37:45.920 Well, let's talk a bit about your work with creating initiatic experiences for men.
00:37:50.620 This is something you've set up.
00:37:52.000 They're going on around the world.
00:37:54.700 What is it you think a man has to learn in an initiation that they can only learn, possibly, in that initiation?
00:38:02.880 Yeah, well, let me precede any remarks I make by saying most people do not need to go through a formal initiation rite.
00:38:11.300 I wish they could.
00:38:13.120 But most people are initiated by life itself.
00:38:16.860 It's just that it takes so much longer.
00:38:20.960 So many men only start growing up seriously in their 60s, when the whomps on the side of the head have accumulated enough
00:38:33.280 that they start letting go of their righteousness, their control, their power, where they could have been taught all of that,
00:38:44.280 admittedly, in immature early form.
00:38:49.140 At the age of 17, that life is not about going up.
00:38:53.820 It's about going down.
00:38:55.520 Not about winning, but about losing.
00:38:58.160 You know, again, to speak to any who are raised Christian, our logo is a man who's utterly losing.
00:39:08.640 We call it the cross.
00:39:11.160 Now, here we have that as our logo, how to lose but still win.
00:39:15.780 And we never got the point, it seems to me.
00:39:21.340 So, I don't want to say they've got to go through it.
00:39:25.140 But, yeah, back in the early 90s, for about five years, I read everything I could on this universal phenomenon of male initiation rites.
00:39:36.960 And I came up with the communalities of what they all seem to be saying.
00:39:44.480 To give one summary phrase, and it is oversimplified, but I think it's still true to my reading, is this.
00:39:56.960 Man can't handle power until they have made journeys of powerlessness.
00:40:04.380 If you need power too much, you're always going to abuse it.
00:40:11.840 I mean, look at our politics.
00:40:13.900 Look at our churches.
00:40:15.820 This isn't even hard to prove.
00:40:18.680 The consistent abuse of power of governments and dictators and senators and congressmen all over the world, not just America.
00:40:29.860 That's why the male had to be initiated.
00:40:33.280 So, male initiation rites were all about a male facing his power needs.
00:40:42.840 I've got some diagrams about this.
00:40:46.520 Well, not in my book, Adam's Return.
00:40:49.540 I just described what a classic initiation rite would include.
00:40:54.700 In my book, Wild Man to Wise Man, I have a couple diagrams.
00:41:02.040 Yeah.
00:41:02.420 And through these initiations about power, like you learn, like you talk about in your books, you learn paradoxes about power.
00:41:09.900 Yes.
00:41:10.260 When you try to grab on and hold on to power, it leaves you.
00:41:13.940 But when you try to basically let it go, you become more powerful, more influential in a weird way.
00:41:22.080 When I'm weak, I'm strong.
00:41:23.500 As St. Paul said, I don't know why it's true.
00:41:27.780 But you discover your own power at a much deeper level when you can't have the obvious power.
00:41:35.340 We've all seen the shows through our whole life of a handicapped man who still runs the marathon.
00:41:43.280 Why do those stories so fascinate us?
00:41:47.240 It's the classic hero's journey, the weak man who is really the strong man.
00:41:55.500 And then we take some kind of delight in these heroic rich men who fall from power.
00:42:04.180 He looks like he's powerful, but he ends up being evil.
00:42:09.400 He's not powerful at all.
00:42:12.200 I mean, is that half the novels that have ever been written?
00:42:17.240 I think it might be.
00:42:20.180 And when you first say it, people say, oh, that can't be true.
00:42:24.020 But check it out.
00:42:25.940 We're fascinated by how the man matures and does not mature.
00:42:32.740 We read it in romantic novel form, opera or movie.
00:42:39.560 But a lot of us haven't made this transfer to real life.
00:42:44.360 And one of those other paradoxes you talk about, that I think is really applicable to men because they're constantly striving.
00:42:50.560 They're constantly trying to achieve.
00:42:53.360 When you go through that initiatic experience, we have that falling.
00:42:56.400 You realize, at least for me personally, like everything you do doesn't.
00:43:01.440 Nothing you do matters.
00:43:02.960 But everything you do does matter at the same time.
00:43:06.280 There you go.
00:43:07.320 Talk about paradox.
00:43:08.500 And because everything matters ultimately, how you do anything is how you do everything.
00:43:18.220 No one thing can condemn you either.
00:43:22.440 One mistake doesn't determine your life, which is what the guys in jail thought.
00:43:29.120 It's a whole narrative.
00:43:31.040 It's a whole story.
00:43:32.440 It's never just one event.
00:43:36.140 So throughout this conversation, you've talked about how you've incorporated the work of depth psychologists like Jung and also poets and other depth psychologists like Robert Bly, who did Iron John.
00:43:47.600 And there's more in Gillette with his, you mentioned the archetypes, the king, lover, magician, warrior.
00:43:52.220 Now, some people, you talk about this in the book.
00:43:53.840 Some people in Christian circles would call this Dungeons and Dragons masculinity.
00:43:58.500 I think that was a great way to describe it.
00:44:01.360 But you seem very comfortable integrating this into your Christian worldview.
00:44:06.100 How do you, can you walk through how you integrate the ideas from these depth psychologists into your Christian beliefs?
00:44:13.040 Yeah, you know, what the Franciscans gave me, God bless them, was a very good education.
00:44:21.100 They taught us how to think, how to read literature, how to read poetry, how to understand psychology.
00:44:30.960 I got a classic liberal arts, not the modern meaning of the word liberal, liberal arts education, where you were expected to be a Renaissance man, knowing we would be considered just priests.
00:44:46.440 And people would expect us just to talk about scripture or theology.
00:44:53.240 We studied philosophy for four years before the Bible was allowed to be put into our hands as an object of study.
00:45:04.600 Boy, little did I know how wise that was.
00:45:09.100 So for me, truth is truth is truth.
00:45:14.100 You know, St. Thomas Aquinas said, if it's true, it's from the Holy Spirit.
00:45:21.120 Your first question should not be, who said it?
00:45:25.280 You know, did Muhammad say it?
00:45:28.680 Did Gethi say it?
00:45:31.380 No, the question isn't, who said it?
00:45:33.680 Is it true?
00:45:35.920 But that takes some maturity to get to that point.
00:45:39.540 Once you can recognize truth, wherever you see it, no matter what the label is, no matter the ethnicity, the nationality, the religious vocabulary,
00:45:54.260 you don't have any trouble putting all this together.
00:45:58.020 But I know to a lot of people, that's strange.
00:46:01.500 One of the greatest weaknesses, please forgive me for saying this.
00:46:07.260 I'm not trying to criticize my good Protestant brothers and sisters.
00:46:12.360 But when Luther started the Reformation right at the time of the invention of the printing press, which was good,
00:46:20.920 but he said, sola scriptura, only scripture.
00:46:27.200 He set us up for 500 years of dualistic thinking.
00:46:32.980 Only.
00:46:34.340 Whenever you say only, you're a dualistic thinker.
00:46:38.340 Now, I know he meant well.
00:46:39.980 And I know what he was trying to get to, to reform Catholicism, which wasn't paying much attention to scripture.
00:46:47.080 And it still doesn't.
00:46:49.580 I just want to be fair.
00:46:51.280 He was right, but he was wrong.
00:46:54.420 So I'm trying to understand him, too.
00:46:57.980 But it made Western Christianity for 500 years dualistic in its thinking and not able to integrate the other sciences.
00:47:10.840 If we don't integrate science now, I don't know how we can talk to the modern world.
00:47:17.680 My book of a couple of years ago on the Trinity can't get much more theological than that.
00:47:25.160 But I'm using scientific metaphors all the way through.
00:47:30.920 And those are the most compelling for many people.
00:47:34.680 So I'm just saying that, you know, when Jesus said to love the Lord your God with your whole heart, your whole soul, your whole body, your whole mind, and your whole strength,
00:47:50.680 I don't think we've done very well in loving God with our mind, too.
00:47:57.040 So one of the ideas that these guys talk about, Bly and Jung and Moore and Gillette, besides these archetypes that exist and that men can tap into to understand themselves, there's also the idea of the shadow.
00:48:10.700 And you call this, I love how you call it, they call it shadow work, where you're trying to figure out, wrestle with your shadow and figure out what it is.
00:48:17.920 You call it shadow boxing, which I think is pretty cool.
00:48:20.400 I'm going to start using that.
00:48:21.800 What is shadow work?
00:48:23.340 What is shadow boxing for you?
00:48:26.340 Yeah, well, first, this is probably the one breakthrough that we owe Jung and Dad of gratitude for more than anything else.
00:48:36.960 Most of us automatically think of shadow as evil.
00:48:42.900 That is actually to miss the point.
00:48:45.300 It might allow you to do evil, but it's precisely your denial of evil, what you're afraid to see, what you cannot admit is true, and therefore you're more likely to do it while not calling it evil.
00:49:06.000 So it's disguised narcissism.
00:49:10.040 It's denied rage.
00:49:12.880 Pick any of the capital sins.
00:49:16.140 As soon as you say, well, I'm not that way, you probably are.
00:49:20.400 That's what we mean by shadow.
00:49:22.840 It's those things you are unable to see, you are unwilling to see, until you have to, until you have a mirror raised up to your face.
00:49:36.660 It's that part of yourself that you do not want to see.
00:49:40.500 So that holding up the mirror is doing shadow work.
00:49:47.620 It's necessary.
00:49:50.800 And now some people have the honesty and the humility to do it themselves.
00:49:57.660 But I would say that's a minority.
00:50:00.660 Usually you need a partner, a marriage.
00:50:04.400 I mean, that's why marriage is the most reliable vocation.
00:50:07.500 Your husband, your wife is a mirror for you after three years to help you see that you're not a very loving man at all or loving woman.
00:50:20.160 Probably why a lot of marriages don't last.
00:50:22.680 Okay, marriage can be a way for us to figure out what our shadow is.
00:50:25.580 Other people can tell us.
00:50:26.900 But I imagine just like self-reflection can help you get there too.
00:50:30.960 And the goal is not to kill the shadow.
00:50:34.640 It's like that'd be like a first life view approach, right?
00:50:38.640 I'm going to conquer it.
00:50:39.680 Very good.
00:50:40.440 Very good.
00:50:41.160 Yes.
00:50:41.520 It's to integrate it somehow.
00:50:42.860 You know, when I was on my last speaking tour in Germany, I saw the many images of the classic St. Michael on his horse, or at least with a sword, or killing a dragon.
00:51:00.460 That's a first half of life approach to evil.
00:51:03.920 And the Germans in their art had a second image, which is less prominent usually than the image of St. Michael or even St. George,
00:51:17.080 where both male symbols of power, killing evil, killing the dragon.
00:51:23.080 And it's St. Martha.
00:51:25.160 Very few people know about this.
00:51:27.140 And she's always taming the dragon, feeding the dragon.
00:51:33.980 Let me use other words.
00:51:36.280 Reconciling the dragon.
00:51:38.200 Making a friend of the dragon.
00:51:40.880 Learning what the dragon has to teach you.
00:51:44.300 I tell the man on the initiation rites when I used to give him,
00:51:49.040 don't get rid of your sin until you've learned what it has to teach you.
00:51:54.300 So, that's the way of Martha, taming the dragon instead of killing it.
00:52:02.260 Because you never kill it anyway.
00:52:04.520 That's an illusion.
00:52:05.940 Yeah, it's often like a hydra.
00:52:07.200 It just grows back again.
00:52:08.520 Yeah, very.
00:52:09.460 That's perfect.
00:52:10.400 Perfect.
00:52:10.960 Yes.
00:52:11.800 I mean, so we've been talking about what men can start doing to integrate themselves,
00:52:17.460 kind of get on the second half.
00:52:18.500 Well, they can't get there on their own.
00:52:19.960 They have to fall into it.
00:52:20.840 But what can men who are fathers that are listening to this,
00:52:24.380 like what can they do to help their sons, I don't know,
00:52:28.120 be sensitive or be aware that there is a second half of life?
00:52:32.920 Like, you know, get, I mean, it's basically,
00:52:33.960 how do you, how can fathers teach their sons like this kind of soul work
00:52:36.940 that you're talking about?
00:52:38.660 Well, forgive me if the answer is going to sound naive,
00:52:41.440 but spirituality in general is not taught,
00:52:46.560 although that doesn't hurt if it's a little bit.
00:52:49.600 It's caught.
00:52:51.500 It's caught energetically.
00:52:54.160 Where a little boy in the backseat of the car is watching constantly,
00:53:00.800 without even knowing he's watching,
00:53:03.560 how the father reacts in a rageful situation,
00:53:08.180 if he's afraid to pray or can speak comfortably and healthily of God.
00:53:15.880 You can only give away what you have become.
00:53:18.520 So I think the emphasis for any man should be,
00:53:24.540 I've got to do my growing up work myself.
00:53:28.220 I've been using recently, and I won't have time to explain this,
00:53:32.320 but the four categories of Ken Wilber
00:53:35.620 as the description of all spirituality too.
00:53:41.800 He calls it cleaning up stage one.
00:53:45.260 Growing up, stage two.
00:53:50.580 Waking up, stage three.
00:53:54.360 Overcoming your separateness and your superiority.
00:53:58.860 Stage four, showing up.
00:54:02.760 Today we call that giving back.
00:54:05.640 Giving back people who are working for Habitat for Humanity
00:54:10.180 or whatever it might be.
00:54:12.560 That's a mature person.
00:54:15.260 Who has integrated the whole world of spirit enough.
00:54:19.860 He has an excess of life so that he has plenty to give away.
00:54:26.160 That a father can only model that.
00:54:30.160 But a boy wants it so bad that if he doesn't see it in his father,
00:54:35.720 which he often won't,
00:54:37.840 he will look for it in his grandfather,
00:54:40.840 where it's more commonly there at his age.
00:54:45.720 Or in men outside the family.
00:54:49.480 Like a Cub Scout coach or a basketball coach.
00:54:54.060 No, yeah, that idea of finding in your grandfathers,
00:54:56.280 as a sociologist said,
00:54:57.440 that every generation rebels against their father
00:55:00.200 and makes friends with their grandfathers.
00:55:02.500 Well, Richard, where can people go to learn more about your work?
00:55:05.240 Oh, well, we're here in Albuquerque,
00:55:08.680 the Center for Action and Contemplation.
00:55:11.420 That long, cumbersome title becomes our website address,
00:55:18.440 CAC, Center for Action and Contemplation,
00:55:22.120 CAC.org.
00:55:23.680 Another name for everything is our recent podcast on my last book,
00:55:33.180 The Universal Christ.
00:55:35.360 You can also, probably the biggest thing,
00:55:38.680 it's approaching half a million people every day,
00:55:41.480 is my daily meditations, which are free.
00:55:45.860 But you just go to CAC.org, you'll see there.
00:55:49.900 Well, Richard Rohr, thanks so much for your time.
00:55:51.240 It's been a pleasure.
00:55:51.760 Very good to talk to you, Brad.
00:55:54.340 God bless you.
00:55:55.920 My guest today was Father Richard Rohr.
00:55:57.700 He's the author of several books.
00:55:59.440 Just go to Amazon.com, look up Richard Rohr.
00:56:02.180 He's got a ton of them.
00:56:03.020 If you're looking for the books on male spirituality,
00:56:04.820 there's From Wild Man to Wise Man,
00:56:06.560 Adam's Return and On the Threshold of Transformation.
00:56:09.040 And if you're intrigued by that concept by the first half
00:56:11.180 and second half of life, check out Falling Upward.
00:56:13.720 And you can also check out his website, CAC.org,
00:56:16.760 for more information about his work.
00:56:18.240 Also check out our show notes at AOM.IS slash Rohr.
00:56:21.760 You can find links to resources where you can delve deeper into this topic.
00:56:24.320 Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM Podcast.
00:56:34.140 Check out our website at artofmanlios.com,
00:56:36.020 where you find our podcast archives.
00:56:37.880 There's over 500 episodes there,
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00:56:41.460 about personal finances, health and fitness,
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00:57:14.100 It helps out a lot.
00:57:15.080 And if you've done that already, thank you.
00:57:16.740 Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member
00:57:19.180 who would think we could get something out of it.
00:57:20.500 Send them a text, send them an email,
00:57:21.840 or just bring it up in your next conversation.
00:57:23.520 As always, thank you for your continued support.
00:57:25.420 And until next time, this is Brett McKay,
00:57:26.880 reminding you to not only listen to the AOM Podcast,
00:57:29.120 but put what you've heard into action.
00:57:46.740 Don't let you do that.
00:58:05.380 Bye.
00:58:07.520 Bye.
00:58:09.360 Bye.
00:58:11.740 Bye.