Adam's Return E-Book

Richard Rohr

• Herausgeber: WS
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Seitenzahl: 308

Beschreibung

Based on decades of work, travel, and experience, Rohr, a Franciscan brother and best-selling author, unearths the complexities of male spiritual maturation and helps us to understand the importance of male initiation rights in both culture and the church.

Leseprobe

Also by Richard Rohr

Everything Belongs, 1999, revised and updated edition, 2003

Called, Formed, Sent, with Thomas C. Welch, 2002

The Enneagram: A Christian Perspective, with Andreas Ebert, 2001

Hope Against Darkness: The Transforming Vision of St. Francis of Assisi in an Age of Anxiety, with John Bookser Feister, 2001

The Good News According to Luke: Spiritual Reflections, 1997

Jesus’ Plan for a New World: The Sermon on the Mount, with John Bookser Feister, 1996

Job and the Mystery of Suffering: Spiritual Reflections, 1996

Enneagram II: Advancing Spiritual Discernment, 1995

Radical Grace: Daily Meditations, 1995

Quest for the Grail, 1994

Near Occasions of Grace, 1993

Experiencing the Enneagram, with Andreas Ebert et al., 1992

The Wild Man’s Journey: Reflections on Male Spirituality, revised edition (with Joseph Martos), 1992, 1996

Simplicity: The Art of Living, 1991

Discovering the Enneagram: An Ancient Tool for a New Spiritual Journey, with Andreas Ebert, 1990

Why Be Catholic? Understanding our Experience and Tradition, with Joseph Martos, 1989

The Great Themes of Scripture: New Testament, with Joseph Martos, 1988

The Great Themes of Scripture: Old Testament, with Joseph Martos, 1987

“Vacillation,” by William Butler Yeats, is reprinted with the permission of Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group, from The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, vol. 1: The Poems, Revised, edited by Richard J. Finneran. Copyright © 1933 by The Macmillan Company; copyright renewed ©1961 by Bertha Georgie Yeats.

“For the Time Being,” copyright 1944 and renewed 1972 by W. H. Auden, from Collected Poems by W. H. Auden. Used by permission of Random House, Inc.

“Healing” by D. H. Lawrence from The Complete Poems of D. H. Lawrence, edited by V. de Sola Pinto and F. W. Roberts, copyright © 1964, 1971 by Angelo Ravagli and C. M. Weekley, Executors of the Estate of Frieda Lawrence Ravagli. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

This printing: June 2016

The Crossroad Publishing Company

www.crossroadpublishing.com

Copyright © 2004 by Richard Rohr

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of The Crossroad Publishing Company.

This book is typeset in 12/16 Stone Informal. The display type is Tiepolo.

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Rohr, Richard.

Adam’s return : the five promises of male initiation / Richard Rohr.

p.   cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-0-8245-2498-2 (alk. paper)

1. Men–Religious life. 2. Spiritual life–Christianity. I. Title.

BV4440.R64 2004

248.2–dc22

                                                      2004014956

Adamah, the first human name, means “of the earth.”

For all the sons of Adam:

For those who are ashamed of being earth,

For those who love being earth too much,

For those who possess none of the earth,

For those who possess too much of it,

For those who need to know they are earth,

And try to flee to heaven out of shame,

Doubting the garden that they already have,

Abandoning the garden that they already are,

I dedicate this map of return.

CONTENTS

A Word from Richard

One Initiated into What?

Two Why We Need Initiation in Modern Cultures

Three The Two Births

Four The Big Patterns That Are Always True

Five Life Is Hard

Six You Are Not Important

Seven Your Life Is Not about You

Eight You Are Not in Control

Nine You Are Going to Die

Ten What Is the Shape of the Male Soul?

Eleven The Four Initiations

Twelve All Transformation Takes Place in Liminal Space

Thirteen So How Do We Do It?

Fourteen Jesus’s Five Messages/The Common Wonderful

Appendix A Sample Rite

Notes

Bibliography

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Index

A WORD FROM RICHARD

IWOULD LIKE YOU to know a bit about my background at the very beginning. Perhaps it will help you appreciate why I wrote this book. My educational background is in philosophy and theology, and I am self-educated in psychology and sacred story. I am a believing Catholic Christian, a Franciscan by spiritual choice, a spiritual director and community guide by experience, a teacher by gift, and a quasi hermit by preference. I read scholars but am not myself a scholar.

I am a synthesizer of sorts. My task is to get good news to the masses, not making it an elite or academic exercise for an in group. As St. Gregory of Nyssa (335–395) described his own job, mine is to “chew on” the appropriate texts and make them “delectable.” This book is the result of having chewed on plenty of initiation texts, ancient and new, over a period of fifteen years, and I hope the reader will find the result both tasty and nourishing.1

This book is written by a white, middle-class American, who is secure, overeducated, ordained, unmarried, and male. Men like me are much of the structural and spiritual problem. We are sitting comfortably at the supposed top of the pile. And yet that truth, more than anything else, is why I must write this book. Men like me, with access to all manner of privilege and freedom not granted to others, must talk about the male game from within. I think you can unlock spiritual things only from within. Paralleling what women are saying about themselves, men must first and finally interpret men. Surely for the last twenty years, and maybe for much of history, we have largely been interpreted by whatever power group was in charge—doing none of us much good—and very recently by women, which has been both good and bad for us. Men have not, however, described their own souls very well, as if they did not have the language or even the interest. The oral tradition of the quest for the Holy Grail was probably our last serious attempt.2

Traditional initiation rites did just the opposite; they interpreted ordinary men from within—crediting maleness with its own innate spirituality—and worked at bringing men to wholeness from the bottom up, and from the inside out. I will try to do the same here, in the face of a culture, and a church, that usually tries to interpret men from the top down and from the outside in. Such a technique will never work, in my opinion, and it has not been working for some time. Our religious institutions are not giving very many men access to credible encounters with the Holy or even with their own wholeness. We largely give men mandates, scaffolding, signposts, and appealing images that tend to create religious identity and boundaries from the outside. But true happiness, like true enlightenment, is always an inside job. We will finally have to rely upon our own experience anyway, so we might as well guide men toward authentic religious experience. This is the true meaning of tradition, I think.

Though I am not a cultural anthropologist, nor an ethnologist, nor a sacramental theologian, I have talked to some experts, read everything I could,3 and given men’s retreats and male initiation rites for the past twenty years. I have traveled a great deal in doing so, giving conferences for men in North, South, and Central America, Eastern and Western Europe, and several parts of Asia, Africa, and Australia, and talked firsthand to formally initiated men in several cultures. My education on this subject has been largely in the field and on site, including fifteen years as a pastor of a lay community in Cincinnati and fifteen years as an Albuquerque county jail chaplain. All of which has told me who should be listened to and what is worth reading. I hope that puts this theory in touch with some kind of concrete practice. Let’s call it “theology from below,” which for me is the very meaning of the Incarnation and the descent of the Holy Spirit.

My continuing momentum in this work has been a rather constant sadness and disappointment over the lack of an inner life in so many men I meet, even among ministers, religious, and devoted laymen, and high-level and successful leaders from whom we would expect more. It is not their fault, if fault must be named. Usually no one has offered them anything more than Jacob’s cheap “soup.” We are sons of Esau, having sold our birthright for fast-food religion (Genesis 25:29–34). It does not deeply transform the self or the world.

So here are my viewpoints—remembering that every viewpoint is a view from a point, and all we can do is own them and bring them to consciousness: First, I believe that truth is more likely to be found at the bottom and the edges of things than at the top or the center. The top or center always has too much to prove and too much to protect. I learned this by connecting the dots of the Judeo-Christian Scriptures, from my Franciscan background—the pedagogy of the oppressed and the continued testimony of the saints and mystics—and from the first step of Alcoholics Anonymous. Final authority in the spiritual world does not tend to come from any agenda of success but from some form of suffering that always feels like the bottom. Insecurity and impermanence are the best spiritual teachers, as Alan Watts4 and so many others demonstrate. The good news is clearly not a winner’s script, although the ego and even the churches continually try to make it so.

Second, as Einstein put it, I believe that “no problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.”5 I try to teach a contemplative stance toward life that gives people an entirely new way of knowing the world, and that has the power to move them beyond mere ideology and dualistic thinking.6 Frankly, what religion calls contemplation is the only mind that is broad enough and deep enough to answer the real and important questions. Mature religion will always lead you to some form of prayer, meditation, or contemplative mind to balance out our usually calculative mind. Such “seeing”—and that is what it is—always gives you the capacity to be happy and happily alone, rooted elsewhere, comfortable with paradox and mystery, and largely immune to mass consciousness and its false promises. It is called “wisdom seeing.”

Third, I believe that I locate my thought somewhere between the social constructionist position (which says that the male psyche and identity are entirely formed by training and culture) and the essentialist position (which says that there is something inherent that comes with the male psyche and male biology). Outside this endless either/or argument, I believe that we are approximately one-third nature, one-third nurture, and one-third free choice. Such an opinion will probably please no one, but it is very important to me that we retain a strong notion of free will and the human dignity that goes with it, along with a recognition of both foundational male genes and later human conditioning. Otherwise, we end up with either a victim culture or a blame culture like we have in America today. We do not choose what happens to us, but we can cooperate with grace and choose our response to it (Romans 8:28).

I do not presume that there is some ideal masculinity floating around in Plato’s cosmos, but there are, in fact, many masculinities. I hope I can make some contribution to gender studies here by honoring and empowering as many of these masculinities as possible. As a Franciscan Scotist by philosophical training, I believe that God creates only individuals, and God does not merely create genus or species, or what were called “universals.”7 Such a view should help us avoid any rigid ideology or big overarching explanation for everything, for in the end one must deal with this man in this moment and this place. I believe that is exactly what God does, and it is one of the most denied yet foundational themes of the Judeo-Christian Scriptures.8 Such “election” or “chosenness” leaves grace and space around the edges of everything, and I hope we can do the same in this book.

Finally, I believe that our images and words for God matter deeply in the way we live our practical lives because we all become the God we worship. This has been a central breakthrough in awareness in recent decades, thanks largely to feminist theologians.9 I believe that God is the ultimate combination of whatever it means to be male and whatever it means to be female. God is fully sexual in the deepest meaning of that term.10 It is obvious to me that we must, therefore, find public ways to recognize, honor, and name the feminine nature of God, since we have overly limited our metaphors for God for centuries.

I will not eliminate or disallow all those wonderful sexually charged words for God—such as Mother, Father, Son, Daughter, Bride, Bridegroom, Friend, Guest, Lover, Jealous Lover, or even Seducer. Even more, I am not willing to eliminate the notion of God, a relationship with God, or the very word “God” (even though I know that every name for God, including the word itself, will always be a very limited metaphor and will carry a lot of baggage). I hope we can inaugurate a new humility in our use of religious language, which for me is the very proof that it is authentic. The Holy Mystery, our Higher Power if you will, is where all the power for ecstasy, endurance, love, and long-term transformation resides, and we dare not water initiation down to a superficial secularism. A true God always liberates us, primarily from ourselves and for something bigger. In that deep sense, God does save us, precisely by giving himself/herself to us and drawing us into the greater story.11

One

INITIATED INTO WHAT?

           Now that I have gone through my initiation, I am ready for anything anywhere.

—PAUL’S LETTER TO THE PHILIPPIANS, 4:12

           We do not have to risk the adventure alone; for the heroes of all time have gone before us. The labyrinth is thoroughly known; we have only to follow the thread of the heropath. And where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god. Where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves. Where we had thought to travel outward, we shall come to the center of our own existence. Where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world.

—JOSEPH CAMPBELL, HERO WITH A THOUSAND FACES

HOW DO WE EXPLAIN the larger-than-life people we occasionally meet in every country, in most institutions, even the smallest churches, and hidden away in our neighborhoods? There always seem to be one or two people who hold the energy of a group together, strategic individuals whom the Bible would call “chosen people,” men and women who move events and history forward, sometimes almost invisibly. Where do such folks come from? I have given up thinking that such people come from any one religion, any one school of thought, any particular race or nation, any specific socioeconomic sector, or even, indeed, that they are always perfect or moral in the conventional sense. Spiritually powerful individuals seem to cross and defy all of these boundaries.

Something else seems to have happened to them, and one way to put it is that they have somehow been “initiated.” Initiated into their true self, initiated into the flow of reality, initiated into the great patterns that are always true, initiated into the life of God—choose the description with which you are most comfortable. Such initiations took specific ritual forms in every age and every continent for most of human history. They were considered central to the social survival of nearly every culture—and to the spiritual survival of males in particular.

Patterns of initiation are the oldest system of spiritual instruction that we know of, predating all institutional religions. They emerged rather universally in what Karl Jaspers calls Pre-Axial Consciousness, before the Axial Age (800–200 BCE) when we began to organize thought all over the world.12 There is much evidence that this Axial age has run its course and is now turning in on itself. We see it in the bad effects of rationalism, individualism, and patriarchy. I believe this is at the heart of many of our cultural and religious problems today. We now need to recapitulate the wisdom of the pre-Axial Age, together with the clarity and radiance of the Axial Age. I will be taking just such a both-and approach in this book, hopefully being fair to both ages and contributions. Jaspers would call this II Axial Consciousness. I would just call it the effects of the Spirit upon human consciousness.

Some kind of baptism (read: “initiation”) is needed to start the path to spiritual maturity. Fire, water, blood, failure, or holy desire may all be precipitating events, but without a fall or a major dunking into the central mystery, a person has no chance of swimming in the right ocean. It is the necessary journey from the false self to the True Self. Without such a great defeat, we will misinterpret almost all religious words and rituals from our small ego position. We will use God instead of love God. Religion does not work at all unless there has been an encounter, especially a “close encounter of the first kind.” We fall into an unnamable love, and a new freedom that many call God.

In the larger-than-life people I have met, I always find one common denominator: in some sense, they have all died before they died. At some point, they were led to the edge of their private resources, and that breakdown, which surely felt like dying, led them into a larger life. That’s it! They broke through in what felt like breaking down. Instead of avoiding a personal death or raging at it, they went through a death, a death of their old self, their small life, and came out the other side knowing that death could no longer hurt them.

For many Western people, the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth is the preeminent example of this pattern, and he is often recognized, even by many non-Christians, as the most influential person of the last two thousand years. But the pattern is archetypal and hardwired in history, literature, and poetry. Jesus is a perfect exemplar of initiation in its full cycle. But there have been many others who have let “the single grain of wheat die” (a phrase found not just in John’s Gospel but in the mystery religions of Asia Minor). Abraham, Buddha, Mary, Rumi, Joan of Arc, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Mother Teresa, and the blood of all martyrs are the very fuel and fire of history. In fact, if your life does not somehow exemplify this full cycle, you are merely helpful or interesting, but not yet a moshel meshalim, a master of wisdom.

On some real level, all truly great people have faced “the big one,” and their greatness consists in knowing, as my father, Francis of Assisi, did that any “second death could do them no harm.” This experiential knowledge of death’s lack of final power is the essence of every true initiation experience. Such people live in a different realm beyond our usual fears, an alternative reality, different than the one we take for granted. If you somehow make that passover, then you are initiated. You cannot fake it by any mere belief system, any moral performance, the reassurance of belonging to a group, or any heroic endurance contest. Paul brilliantly lists all of these as the usual counterfeits for love (1 Corinthians 13). I would say they are the common substitutes the ego concocts when it has not really passed over from death to real life. An uninitiated ego becomes rigid about words and rituals when it lacks any real inner experience. There is a clear before and after to an initiated person, and afterward you know you are in a different psychic place; you are a different person. (In some cultures, old debts and contracts did not even apply to the newly initiated individual! You were truly honored as a new creation.)

In most of history, the journey was taught in sacred space and ritual form, which clarified, distilled, and shortened the process. It was not a lecture series. This is true traditionalism, and it is the foundation of what we later called sacraments. Life and its cycles initiate us similarly, until we hopefully get the message for ourselves. Many do not get it, I am afraid. They “rage against the dying of the light” until the end. Since rites of passage and sacred space have fallen out of favor in our consumer cultures, most people don’t learn how to move past their fear of diminishment, even when it stares them down or gently invites them. They are not “prepared for the Passover” (Mark 14:16). I think that this lack of preparation for the passover, our lack of training in grief work and letting go, our failure to entrust ourselves to a bigger life, is the basis of our entire spiritual crisis. All great spirituality is about letting go. Instead we have made it be about taking in, attaining, performing, winning, and succeeding. Spirituality has become a show we perform for ourselves, which God does not need. True spirituality mirrors the paradox of life itself. It trains us in both detachment and attachment, detachment from the passing so we can attach to the substantial. But if you do not acquire good training in detachment, you may attach to all the wrong things, especially your own self-image and its desire for security. Self-interest becomes very well disguised, often passing for religion.

Primal cultures, those societies organized along tribal lines in Pre-Axial Consciousness, did not generally focus on the end of life or on last things. Fear of death, judgment, later reward, and punishment play very little part in their ways of thinking (unlike Christianity). Initiated and initiating cultures focused on getting the beginning right (thus the word initiation), and then they trusted that the end would take care of itself! First things instead of last things were their concern, and this focus makes all the difference in this world because it allows us to live in the present. It connects ordinary time to eternal time, uniting heaven and earth, rather than casting them as opposites, enemies, or one as a mere obstacle course for the other. I am afraid that moderns are utterly schizophrenic about the two worlds most of the time, except when we really love, really pray, or really stand naked in nature.

Our Christian word for this momentous first step is “incarnation” (the uniting of flesh and spirit), and it is the foundation for everything else, which then follows as logical consequence. As the early church fathers understood, “incarnation is already redemption,” and you do not need any blood sacrifice to display God’s commitment to humanity. Once God says yes to flesh, then flesh is no longer bad but the very “hiding and revealing” place of God. Then religion becomes much more an affirmation of life itself and love’s possibility, rather than a funereal fear of death, judgment, and hell. True religion is always an occasion for joyful mysticism rather than a grim test of moral endurance.13

The social and structural genius of initiating cultures is that every generation was given a chance to start anew and afresh. It was the remaking of each generation of men, as a group and as a social unit. It was a salvation of history, not just of individuals. The work of regeneration cannot be done alone because we are essentially social, interconnected beings. Therefore regeneration cannot be taught by mere words or sermons. It needs ritual experience, community support, and even the minor mysticism of firsthand experience to get the fire kindled in each group. No wonder African American Christians emerge from the baptismal river singing “O Happy Day”! No wonder a man’s life did not really begin until he was initiated. Until then he was unborn, a ghost, not a man. Afterward, he was not defined by any small and perhaps dysfunctional family or violent history. He was reconnected to the whole cosmos, realigned with the big picture (Christians, read “Kingdom of God”). He was now a son—and such cultures were not afraid to say it—a son of God! This is what Jesus knew at his initiation, his beloved sonship and the pleasure or favor of his Father (Matthew 3:17).

Regeneration’s ability to bring us joy is radical and needed hope for our present world, which is largely defined by remembered grievances, tribal identities, and past history. With improved historical records and easy access to them, we actually have better reasons for hating one another, for anger and violence toward one another, than ever before! Terrorism is now defining the shape of history for generations to come—precisely because our generations experience no regeneration. The Indians dislike us more than they did fifty years ago, as do many African Americans and most foreigners. The cycle of violence seems to be the shape of our future. Without the spiritual regeneration of each generation, we are paralyzed by our past, and the future is only more of the same. The current religious tone is no more than a bad novel of crime and punishment.

Though both men and women are in need of initiation today, in this book I will be focusing on the initiation needed by the males of our species. Women more commonly had fertility or puberty rites because they matured in a markedly different way. Many cultures and religions saw the male, left to himself, as being a dangerous and even destructive element in society. For whatever reasons, the male did not naturally build up the common good, but invariably sought his own security and advancement as a matter of course. In some ways, women were historically initiated by their one-down position in patriarchal societies, by the humiliations of blood (menstruation, labor, and menopause), by the ego-decentralizing role of child raising, and by their greater investment in relationships. Men have always seemed to need a whomp on the side of the head, a fall from the proverbial tower, their own blood humiliation (which became circumcision in an amazing number of cultures), in order to become positive, contributing, or wise members of the larger community.

As Ernest Becker argues so compellingly in his Pulitzer Prize–winning book, The Denial of Death, the heroic projects of men are mostly overcompensations for a paralyzing fear of death, powerlessness, and diminishment. Until men move into death and live the creative tension of being both limited and limitless, he says, they never find their truth or their power. As he shockingly put it, we are overwhelmed that we are somehow godly and yet “gods who shit.”14 Too often, egotism, performance, ambition, and bravado in the male proceed from a profound fear of this failure, this humanity, this death, this shit. The heroic project never works for long, and it always finally backfires into anger, depression, and various forms of scapegoating and violence. In avoiding death, a man ironically avoided life, and this central insight is what animated the various rites of passage in primal cultures, hoping to lead men into real life early in life.

Today young men try to self-initiate by pushing themselves to the edges and into risk in various ways. The instinct for initiation is still there in young men, but usually not the wisdom nor the guidance to go the full cycle and understand the message. We are finally healed by encountering “the real,” which is precisely everything about reality, warts and all. To forgive ourselves of everything is the deepest kind of death for the ego. Such an initiation into death, and therefore into life, rightly saved a man. Catholics call it the paschal mystery or the passion of Christ. The word itself is a giveaway, because passion (patior) means to “allow” or “suffer reality.” It is not a doing, but a being done unto. Today young men seek salvation through glib answers and heady beliefs in what Jesus did for them instead of walking the mystery themselves too. True religion is not about winning eternal life later by passing some giant SAT exam now. It is about touching upon life now, in this moment, and knowing something momentous yourself.

Classic initiation rites brilliantly succeeded in preparing men for both stages of their life: training young men for the necessary discipline and effort required in the ascent of the first half of life, and preparing them ahead of time for the necessary descent and letting go of the second half of life.15 Today we do neither tasks of life very well, if at all, and institutional religion just keeps performing the first task of creating boundaries, identity, and ego structures over and over again. Ancient peoples saw that if men missed their initiation, they became unworkable human beings, for themselves and for the community. Every missed rite of passage leads to a new rigidification of the personality, a lessening ability to see, to adjust, to understand, to let go, to be human. It makes men finally incapable of the wisdom of the second half of life because they keep seeking the containment and private validation of the first half of life.

There is only one set of exceptions to this predictable narrowing and rigidification that takes place in people. Many handicapped and poor people, many people in minority positions, many who work with the dying and oppressed, most survivors of near death experiences, and true mystics in all religions are the glaring exceptions. They often grow more radiant, more flexible, and more compassionate with age. This is why the biblical tradition teaches that the “little ones” have a big head start in the ways of wisdom and spiritual initiation.16

If anyone tells you that you can be born again, enlightened, or saved, and going to heaven, and does not first speak to you very honestly about dying, do not believe that person. There is no renewal in all of nature without a preceding loss. Even the sun is dying every moment. You cannot be born “again” if you do not die first. The prosperity gospel is no Gospel at all. Death and life are in an eternal embrace, two sides of the same coin. We cannot have one without the other. It is the one absolutely common theme at the bottom of every single initiation rite that I have studied. Any initiation that does not experientially teach this paschal mystery is not an initiation at all.

Two

WHY WE NEED INITIATION IN MODERN CULTURES

           Lest we who have preached to others miss the point ourselves.

—1 CORINTHIANS 9:27

UNLESS A MAN has on some level been involved in the human struggle, it might be hard for him to know what is missing from society. You can only miss something that you have searched for and partially experienced. In fact you do not even search for it until you have already touched it. Now that classic initiation has been so long absent from Western society, we can do no more than point to the patterns of nature, the quick deconstruction of culture when it stops initiating, and some validating patterns in the very nature and growth of the brain.

We assume that animals imprint and pass on instinct more naturally than we do. But even our brothers in the animal world make it clear that juniors need elders to know who they are. Both humans and animals are imitative, or mimetic. We desire what others desire, and we do what we see others doing, even though it is humiliating for postmoderns to admit it. As Rogers and Hammerstein put it, we all “need to be taught, we need to be carefully taught.” A few years ago there was a nature special on television about elephants in a certain part of Africa. For some reason, these young bull elephants were acting strangely out of character—antisocial and aimlessly violent; they were stomping on VWs, pushing over trees for no reason, and even killing other small animals and baby elephants. Park rangers came in to study the problem and, in the course of their investigation, they discovered that there were no older bull elephants in that area. By some accident, all the older bulls had either died or been poached for their ivory, which left the teenage males to roam and forage out of control. Their solution?

They brought in some older bulls from other areas by helicopter, lowered them onto the scene, and in a matter of weeks, amazingly, the whole situation had changed. Apparently, all the old bulls did was wave their ears and make various sounds or small charges, and somehow the younger male elephants understood through these communications that their behavior was not the way good elephant boys should act. It seemed to be just that simple. Things soon returned to normal once the elders operated as elders. In the human realm, when there are no “kings,” young warriors become brutal, magicians behave as charlatans, and lovers are soon addicts. Someone has to give the young male boundaries and identity. He does not get them by himself or without guidance.

We are not a healthy culture for boys or men. Not the only reason, but surely one reason is that we are no longer a culture of elders who know how to pass on wisdom, identity, and boundaries to the next generation. Most men are over-mothered and under-fathered—now even more in the age of single parents. Or to use the title of Alexander Mitscherlich’s classic, we are a “society without fathers.”17 The effects of this are lifelong for both genders, creating boys who never grow up and want to marry mothers instead of wives, and girls who want securing and affirming daddies instead of risk-taking partners. Neither gender is ready for the work and adventure of a full life.

The current older generation of men in the United States has, to a great extent, not been mentored by their own fathers. They were usually given necessary messages either in quick male style or translated through the language and experience of women. Women have been training boys to be their version of men, or men who have not been mentored have been modeling a teenage level of ego development. Neither is what we need.

We are starting at zero now, in many cases, or praying for some act of spontaneous combustion, since you can pass on only what you yourself know. You can lead your sons and daughters only as far as you yourself have gone. Men who lost their fathers at age ten may do fine with their own sons up to the approximate age of ten, and then they often lose self-confidence in their parenting abilities. Following are just a very few of the sad statistics regarding young men who have not been mentored by elder men.

The patterns of failure among our young men are frightening; the levels of depression, suicide, drug abuse, alcoholism, and violence among young males today are exponential: “Over 94 percent of all inmates are male. Not only do men live an average of seven years less than women, but they suffer far more than their female counterparts from ulcers and other stress-related diseases. They are more likely than women to die sooner from each of the fifteen leading causes of death…. Over 80 percent of all suicides are men. In the twenty–twenty-four age bracket, males commit suicide almost six times as often as females. When men are over eighty-five, they are over fourteen times as likely to commit suicide as women of the same age. Men are hurting.”18

For twenty years we were told that our whole education system was biased toward the success of boys and men, and yet now the results appear to be exactly the opposite. In recent years, girls have been surpassing boys in leadership positions, valedictorian addresses, graduation, and many of the more important jobs afterward. It is not politically correct to speak about this in many circles, the assumption being the opposite. Boys are succeeding largely at sports, but even there the young women are moving in, and boys’ confidence continues to falter.19

You need a good bull elephant around or you won’t know how to be an elephant at all. I was a jail chaplain for fourteen years in Albuquerque, and the only thing that almost all prisoners had in common was that none of them had good fathers.