Showing my work: part two...

NOTE:  The next segment in an unfolding series...thanks to my friend John for turning me on to the Leonard Cohen tune at the end of this posting.  

Part Two:  showing my work...
Over the years I have assumed the role of theological brat, jester, curmudgeon and now elder.  The archetypal antecedents of this self-definition would include:

+ The puer aeternus:  the eternal boy child who, like Icarus, was filled with passion and awe without wisdom and so crashed to his death.

+ The clown/fool/jester: the one who knew how to make others laugh and cry and poke fun at the sins of the status quo without owning the depths of brokenness in my own heart.

+ The creator: the one who wanted to make something beautiful out of the inner and outer brokenness but too often was addicted to perfectionism.

+  The magician:  the one who uses charm and workaholism to bend every situation to my control.

+ The outlaw:  the one who became cynical and ached to throw it all away when all my illusions no longer worked or kept me distracted from my pain.

+ The king:  the one who has spent tons of time with his wounds and has a little bit of insight to share about the journey

+ The senex: the older man who lives beyond the realm of power and control and seeks to share compassion and tenderness.

(For more background, see Carolyn Myss @ http://www.myss.com/ library/contracts/three_archs.asp, Carl Golden @ http://www.soulcraft.co/ essays/the_12_common_archetypes.html and Amazon @ http://www.amazon. com/Essential-Mens-Movement-Books/lm/3681PEHP8ZJVN)

Robert Bly, James Hillman, Robert Moore, Thomas More and Sam Keen have all noted in their various ways that if men do not spend time in "the ashes" as a youth - where they can be taught and trained the wisdom of their mortality - they will become undisciplined wild men as they mature.  The Celtic axiom, "The warrior must learn to dance before he can use the sword" is the word of the day because undisciplined wile men become violent to women and children and eventually self-destructive, too. Without the training of rites of passage, masculine wild energy is never focused on protecting others - just think of urban/rural gangs and/or the violence of soldiers caught in blood lust - and in time it becomes becomes self-directed. 

The mytho-poetic trajectory of masculine development, therefore, notes that at about 40 or 50 men are offered one more chance to go deep and learn from their failures. If they pause and let themselves fall - surrendering and accepting their shadow and blind spots as well as their dependence on a power greater than themselves - they can mature into a healthy role model for other men that includes the archetype of the king and eventually the sage or senex.  If men choose to simply act out and let their "mid-life crisis" burn with stupid and wild choices, however, these men will become cynics or simply old, useless and mean-spirited fools.

I have written elsewhere about my own downward spiral at about age 50 and how I almost crashed and burned.  Fr. Richard Rohr describes the necessity and even blessing of such a collapse like this in his work on "falling upward."

Some have called this principle of going down to go up a “spirituality of imperfection” or “the way of the wound.” It has been affirmed in Christianity by St. Thérèse of Lisieux as her Little Way, by St. Francis as the way of poverty, and by Alcoholics Anonymous as the necessary First Step. St. Paul taught this unwelcome message with his enigmatic “It is when I am weak that I am strong” (2 Corinthians 12:10). Of course, in saying that, he was merely building on what he called the “folly” of the crucifixion of Jesus—a tragic and absurd dying that became resurrection itself.

You will not know for sure that this message is true until you are on the “up” side. You will never imagine it to be true until you have gone through the “down” yourself and come out on the other side in larger form. You must be pressured from on high, by fate, circumstance, love, or God, because nothing in you wants to believe it, or wants to go through it. Falling upward is a secret of the soul, known not by thinking about it or proving it but only by risking it—at least once. And by allowing yourself to be led—at least once. Those who have allowed it know it is true, but only after the fact.

Rohr goes on to note that, "The path of descent is the path of transformation. Darkness, failure, relapse, death and woundedness are our primary teachers, rather than ideas or doctrines."  

No one willingly or joyfully embraces the downward path of transformation - we all want to believe we are the exception to the rule - but without it we are doomed.  Further, the invitation to the descent is so counter-cultural - challenging the American ethos of rugged, self-determination and macho power - that most men (and more and more women, too) find that they have to be dragged by circumstances and failures greater than their control into this journey.  

Rohr recently noted that in the spirituality of Christianity, Jesus understood the path of descent when he spoke of the "sign of Jonah" in Luke 11: 29:

This clear one-liner of Jesus feels rather amazing and largely unheard. Especially since our logo became the sign of the cross. Maybe they are the same sign? Indeed it is not a sign at all, but more an anti-sign. It seems to demand that we must release ourselves into a belly of darkness before we can know what is essential. It insists that the spiritual journey is more like giving up control than taking control. It might even be saying that others will often throw us overboard, as was the case with Jonah, and that will get us to the right shore—and even by God’s grace more than any right action on our part.

Jonah knew what God was doing, and how God does it, and how right God is—only after emerging from the belly of the whale. He has no message whatsoever to give until he has first endured the journey, the darkness, the spitting up on the right shore—all in spite of his best efforts to avoid these very things. Jonah indeed is our Judeo-Christian symbol of transformation. Jesus had found the Jonah story inspiring, no doubt, because it described almost perfectly what was happening to him!

It is my conviction that the disestablishment of the Church in North America is not unlike the path of descent:  it holds the potential for great learning and liberation in both the spiritual and social environment.  This downward path of transformation compels us to trust God more than self.  It makes clear why the way of tenderness and hospitality are more not only more satisfying than acts of aggression but also salvific.  And, I dare say, it points to a way of living that is is grounded in playfulness and renewal. 

There is an old saying that goes something like: you can't give what you don't have and you can't know what you ain't got.  Having spent time in the ashes in pursuit of my own destruction - and having tasted something of God's grace and healing through my own sad descent - helps me embrace it within the culture. It also helps me understand that the disestablishment of the church at this moment in time is bigger than MY personal journey to the bottom. As a culture, the Christian church in North America is being dragged into the ashes. And as Douglas John Hall wrote at the start of this essay, the call of faith is to interpret it beyond just the negative truths. 

The wise old poet of rural America, Wendell Berry, said it better than most in one of his earlier poems, "Mad Farmer Flying the Flag of Rough Branch Secedes from the Union."

From the union of power and money,
from the union of power and secrecy,
from the union of government and science,
from the union of government and art,
from the union of science and money,
from the union of ambition and ignorance,
from the union of genius and war,
from the union of outer space and inner vacuity,
the Mad Farmer walks quietly away.
There is only one of him, but he goes.
He returns to the small country he calls home,
his own nation small enough to walk across.

He goes shadowy into the local woods,
and brightly into the local meadows and croplands.
He goes to the care of neighbors,
he goes into the care of neighbors.
He goes to the potluck supper, a dish from each house
for the hunger of every house.
He goes into the quiet of early mornings
of days when he is not going anywhere.
Calling his neighbors together into the sanctity of their lives
separate and together
in the one life of their commonwealth and home,
in their own nation small enough for a story
or song to travel across in an hour, he cries:
Come all ye conservatives and liberals
who want to conserve the good things and be free,
come away from the merchants of big answers,
whose hands are metalled with power;
from the union of anywhere and everywhere
by the purchase of everything from everybody at the lowest price
and the sale of anything to anybody at the highest price;
from the union of work and debt, work and despair;
from the wage-slavery of the helplessly well-employed.
From the union of self-gratification and self-annihilation,
secede into care for one another and for the good gifts of Heaven and Earth.

Come into the life of the body, the one body
granted to you in all the history of time.
Come into the body's economy, its daily work,
and its replenishment at mealtimes and at night.
Come into the body's thanksgiving, when it knows
and acknowledges itself a living soul.
Come into the dance of the community, joined
in a circle, hand in hand, the dance of the eternal
love of women and men for one another
and of neighbors and friends for one another.

Always disappearing, always returning,
calling his neighbors to return, to think again
of the care of flocks and herds, of gardens
and fields, of woodlots and forests and the uncut groves,
calling them separately and together, calling and calling,
he goes forever toward the long restful evening
and the croak of the night heron over the river at dark.

I am a grand dad now. I have less time in front of me than behind me. I am watching my children take authority and control not only of their lives but of the public realm.  I understand that my work, therefore, is to get out of the way - to be present should any one wish to consult me on my experience and limited wisdom - but mostly to get out of the way. I sense that this is true in many ways for the North American Church.  You might say this is one of the practical ways of living into the full consequences of the journey of descent.

(There will be at least one more installment of this "showing my work" essay but now it is time for some red wine, French cinema and snuggle time with the puppy.)