As background for my comments, I want to share with you my belief that all men and women are built for love and healing and that the central struggle of all civilizations is to figure out how to create communities and families that honor this as a foundation for citizen fulfillment. Obviously we humans have a lot of potential yet to realize.

I also want you to be clear that, for this short talk, I know I am making some generalizations to which, thank God, there are some exceptions. I invite you to listen to the wisdom that might be contained in the generalizations rather than track what might be missing. I do, for example, emphasize the aggressive end of the male role more than the passive, though I am certainly aware of how undermining of love the passive and passive aggressive end is.

Mainstream American men definitely have a journey to take to arrive at a place where we can participate in life in a way that is fulfilled by knowing love and living its principles.

The foundation for this journey is a boyhood where not enough love and too much fear and shame are the socially sanctioned norm. The impact of this imbalance sets up a life long struggle.

As boys become men, we know how to perform for status and acceptance, we know how to do the provider role, we have been prepared to kill and die in the name of our manhood, and we believe that sexual obsession is a natural and normal part of our manhood.  We know that any kind of surrender equals defeat and we are masters of both ends of the shame and blame game.  Is it a wonder so many of us cannot sit still, as we define our worth so much by doing and not by being?  And if we do sit still, it is mostly to check out or distract ourselves, not to check in on a rich inner life.

If this list sounds intense and grim, it’s because it is so……..too much of the time for most men. Until one names the patterns and understands the wisdom in these statements, men and those close to them must live with the impact of this profound imbalance. I love men and know the effort they make to do the right thing and to be good men in spite of the way they are boxed in by the fear of failing at the male role and seeking relief in sexual obsession.

bell hooks, a radical feminist with a love for men wonders when men will have a revolution and refuse to live such loveless lives…

For the last 21 years I have been trying to create a roadmap and a community that give men an opportunity to find their way back to a more loving and fulfilling foundation on which to base their relationships, their work and their life journey. Although it took me several years to understand, it is also true that the psychological work we do provides a foundation for spiritual development.

I must say, it has taken me most of twenty years to create a roadmap for men that allows me to sleep peacefully through the night.     

So, perhaps you are curious about some of the key elements of the roadmap.  I will share some that are fundamental on the path to strengthen ones loving nature:

A Sense of Safety:

In order for men to embark on the journey from a fear-based to a more love-based life, they must find a place with other men where they sense it is safe to tell the truth about what they struggle with in daily life and about what it was really like to receive less love than you needed in the name of making you into a man. Without truth there can be no movement.  Doing this initial work of testing the waters for safety with other men has the advantage  of challenging the enormous fear men have of being shamed by other men, and therefore, the world,  for not being a real man. This fear of humiliation and isolation is a key component of homophobia, sexism and other social violence.

In an environment that is consistently welcoming and respectful, a man may discover that it might be safe to open the door to telling the truth. Thus begins his journey to love.   At the edge of making the decision to surrender to telling the truth, the men show you how shell shocked they feel from all their efforts to keep the male role performance intact. As they accept the safety, the human warmth and affection that create security can gradually replace the fear and isolation, and the edges begin to soften.

To Safety, we now add

Self-worth

A central theme in the excesses of training boys to be acceptable men involves teaching them that their value is rigidly and absolutely linked to performance. If you wonder why men are obsessed with fixing, giving advice no one asked for, being right and staying busy, or alternately shut down, well, it is a logical consequence of not enough appreciation for who they are and too much for performing a role. Key parts of the journey to love is learning to self love and break the chains of performance being the only and never ending hope of being good enough to love. Fulfillment and love of life and others requires a measure of self love as the New Testament commandment to love thy neighbor as thyself so brilliantly states.

We start by taking on each man’s self-shaming language and create some room for the possibility that we are unconditionally good enough to love. After all, the heart of love has no strings attached. If it is truly love, it is by definition unconditional. Once we take this on we do not let up. Learning to accept our unconditional goodness and our perfectly imperfect natures is a constant topic of discussion and interaction. It is a sweet change from baiting and teasing to see men committed to each others remembering of their inherent goodness.

To Safety and Self worth, we add

Respectful Communication

The roadmap from fear to love must include directions to get to respectful communication. Respect provides a foundation upon which love can grow. It creates an environment of moderation which is a prerequisite for loving intimacy. Men often defend their intensity as passion, which it is not. It is more accurately described as an overload of fear. Intensity takes up all the room at the table and for intimacy to occur there must be room for two. And passivity is not the same thing as presence. Along with boundaries and not blaming others for what our brains make up, the men say that learning to give and receive respectful and loving attention are key elements of the roadmap. Of course this means challenging the idea that the only way to be acceptable is a good performance. For many men, coming to accept that their attentive presence has value takes much practice and repeated experiences of letting go of performance anxieties and pressures.

Truth Telling and Feeling are next on the map

Telling our truth about our experience of being a boy and being subjected to the excesses of training to be a man, including naming and experiencing our authentic feelings about the training is a fundamental act of courage on the path to reclaiming our loving nature. What was it really like to be taught to stop showing feelings in the name of your manhood at age 4? And to have this reinforced so systematically. I think of mainstream boyhood as a reign of terror that one is expected to endure without showing how deeply hurt and lonely and insecure and inexplicably ashamed it makes us feel. Depriving a human of the right to grieve, in the name of his manhood has profound consequences for physical, emotional and spiritual development. On the path to love, reclaiming the ability to surrender to the grieving process is central. The over controlling of the self not only blocks the suppressed fear and pain and shame, but the capacity to love and experience joy. The courage it takes men to surrender is enormous and most men think they will die. A steady commitment to incrementally bring down the wall works fine.

Sexual Obsession and Intimacy

Any roadmap to help men move to a more loving relationship with themselves, life and others must address and dismantle the myths about sexual obsession and intimacy. Of course the sex drive is strong for species propagation, however, for mainstream men, it is loaded up with lots of other feelings and expectations that turn the potential for strong feeling into a very dysfunctional compulsion. And this overload of feelings and expectations has nothing to do with sex. Being denied access to the natural healing process and being terrified of being humiliated for getting the male role performance wrong leaves men little room for relief and intimacy. We are misled into believing that sex with the right person in the female role is all we need. This is a lie that reinforces compulsivity and isolation and blocks both intimacy and the spiritual journey. It defines men as machines that only need to be oiled occasionally to keep on functioning. Working with men to create a loving context for sexual pleasure involves showing them how they got off track through no fault of their own and giving them a functional alternative to work with. A workable definition of loving intimacy includes understanding that attention, appreciation, acceptance, affection and allowing (support for one’s authentic life) are actions that can be called loving. It is about showing them how their chronic sexual fantasies are more about unresolved boyhood wounds and boyhood longings that anything having to do with real humans in the present. This is very challenging work and takes a lot of courage and determination, to say nothing of more time than anyone would wish. The rewards are great as the intensity comes down and love becomes concrete.

Anger, Abuse and Sacred Rage

Throughout the culture, we often do not distinguish between anger and abuse and doing so matters a great deal to creating loving relationships. Put succinctly, anger informs love and abuse destroys it. How can anyone learn to love another without learning his or her likes and dislikes? Anger is the feeling we experience when we do not like something and provides a way to give important information to another. Since feeling anger is a way we esteem ourselves, we all want to know how to honor the feeling. Unlike abuse, anger is only intense, not menacing. Introducing this on the roadmap to love is a gift not without challenges. In our confusion and lack of modeling, we are all, both men and women, frightened of men’s anger because in our minds it is most often enmeshed with our deep fears of male violence. Proceed we must, but with a degree of mindfulness about the reactivity we are likely to encounter. To the work on anger and abuse, we add the work of sacred rage. It is an expression of the profound unworkability of being asked to live a loveless life in the name of our manhood.

The Magic Of Community

An ongoing component of the roadmap that is best described as magic, is having a community of men surround you and embrace you as you take this journey. This is a powerful contradiction to the lack of loving fatherly/male attention that is most men’s experience. Coming to count on a container of meaningful support for one’s journey to love causes an internal shift that keeps lifting the burden and welcomes one to look forward to new possibilities. It also provides a contradiction to one of the most divisive components of patriarchal culture, the idea that men are inherently dangerous and women are safe. This sets up men to avoid intimate relationships with men and overload women with impossible expectations of providing relief services.  Love does not know this kind of divisiveness.

So I offer safety, self worth, respectful communication, telling the truth and feeling, moving beyond sexual obsession as a definition of intimacy, distinguishing between anger, abuse and sacred rage and finally the magic of community as the key elements on men’s journey from a fear based life to more of a love based life.

I am grateful for the privilege of doing this work as a way of helping me, my family and my brothers and my community move in a more loving and life-affirming direction and I offer you my blessings for your lifelong journey to love.

(The following poem was read at the original presentation. It has been suggested that it is a distraction from the original message.)

I would like to close with a poem by Louis Evely, a man who was a religious leader in the Christian tradition. His language is regrettably male centric and there is wisdom in his thoughts.