Masculine Spirituality

Recently I've been involved in a little bit of discussion over masculine spirituality. Check out Prodigal Kiwi and Circl e of Pneuma [both worth keeping tabs on, btw]. I think it's a hard issue to deal with in the west just now because we are just coming to terms with empowering and integrating the feminine and feminist insights. However the issue that is more sharply emerging is that men have for a long while now been alienated from Church, spirituality and indeed emotional intelligence in many cases. The feminisation of the workplace has made this a more urgent concern since it starts to marginalise men also in the economic sphere where they have historically been 'strong' and gained a sense of identity, however problematically. It is easy to see that this is a recipe for identity crisis for men esppecially with few or no spiritual resources to fall back on.

Part of the difficulty also is that culturally we have still not resolved the debate between cultural constructivist interpretations of gender identity and biological innateness approaches. While it now looks likely that both are involved, the degree and interpretation is still being understood. So with some trepidation I recommend Richard Rohr's work. Mainly because he seems to be alive to the gender issues in a way that is friendly to the best insights of feminism and yet he is also trying to forge an approach to masculine spirituality that actually does have a place for men as men and seems to have some kind of continuity both with historical association and with the more assured results of biological and cultural study. He is careful to distinguish true and false masculine and feminine approaches and the path of growth for or in each. My only caveat is that I'm not totally happy with the Jungian approach, but maybe that isn't determinative.
He writes:
"A masculine spirituality would emphasize action over theory, service to the human community over religious discussions, speaking the truth over social graces, and doing justice over looking nice. Without a complementary masculine, spirituality becomes overly feminine (which is really a false feminine!) and characterized by too much inwardness, preoccupation with relationships, a morass of unclarified feeling, and endless self-protectiveness. "
The interesting thing to me is that many of these characteristics are ones I do see emerging or gaining greater prominence round the margins of the church today in the west.

One of the observations I would add to the discussion is the prominence of men in alt.worship; some have linked this to a re-emergence of male dominance, but look at Rohr's list of characteristics again ... one or two of them seem to play into alt.worship especially at the level of lads playing with technology! It may not be patriarchy at all, it may be a partial recovery of masculinity in a spiritual setting and rather than telling it off for sexism we might note the paradox that by trying to address an alleged sexism, we might in fact be removing a space for men to reconnect spiritually. Just as I recognise the need for women to have women-friendly spaces, so too amen-friendly. We have to be careful before we jump to the accusation of oppressive gender bias. We need to recognise the coming crisis of masculinity and for the sake of our future, pro-act to deal with it.
Masculine Spirituality by Richard Rohr, OFM: