Back before this politically correct era, many of us were trained to use the above jingle to count the number of words per minute we could beat out on a real typewriter. Now is precisely the time for men to address some of our own unique spiritual, sexual, and vocational issues for the sake of all parties concerned, women and other men, wives and companions, sons and daughters, parents and friends, colleagues and enemies—the world.

Men are in crisis. One young adult who read this wrote in the margin, “We are?” After pondering his comment, I went to listen to a lecture by Brother Andrew of Holy Cross Monastery, a Bendictine community in West Park, New York. A native Scot, he told how in Celtic tradition men reluctant to express emotion would sing their feelings. It would not be unusual in a family gathering for someone to suggest, “Let’s have a wee concert.” Then everyone, even Uncle Bobby or Aunt Maggie who could not carry a tune would contribute some bit of music, others stomping a toe, humming along. Or after supper, a wife would say to her husband, “Ah, Darlin’ sing to me.” And he would grunt, “Nah”—but later proceed to croon, “Your love is the reddest rose…”

Whatever your background—African, Native American, Middle-Eastern, European, Asian, Jewish, Hispanic—the rituals where the majority of men were singers, drummers, harpists, poets, dreamers, storytellers and pray-ers have been largely squeezed out by our Westernized way of life and work.

So the crisis is subtle, yet obvious. Men still die sooner than women of a myriad of health-related, stress-related causes, even in Japan with the highest longevity rate. And in the United States, heart attacks, the number one killer, strike at a significantly higher rate among men, and at one time of the week—Monday mornings, a telltale clue concerning men and work. (1) We fall in love and father children at alarming rates without knowing how to love them or their mothers. In Boys Will Be Boys: Breaking the Link Between Masculinity and Violence, Myriam Miedzian writes that 89 percent of all violent crimes were committed by men; 1.8 million women were physically assaulted by husbands or boyfriends annually; three times more men than women were murdered. (2) And, I would add, most “responsible” men work our butts off without knowing why, then die early of physical problems related to our loneliness.

This is not “male bashing”—it is reality in the post-industrial, post-modern, technological world. In the past our elders were our mentors. But since no one has ever lived in the twenty-first century before, our elders cannot say to us, “This is what it’s like,” since no one has ever been an elder now.

Out of Crisis: A Collage of Opportunity

Many of us grew up with a picture of what life would look like, even if it was an idealized picture. But now all we have are torn fragments of our pictures. What is required is a new art form, let’s say, a collage of these fragmented traditions of family, spirituality, vocation, sexuality, values.

But at the very time when we are experiencing this major fragmentation, we are also losing the glue and the backboard for the collage! That’s the real crisis. The spiritual bonding for this new configuration—the lost stories, myths, ballads, prayers, rituals— must be refashioned if we are to create a meaningful collage out of these scraps of yesterday’s black and white snapshots and today’s color prints.
Just as the word for “crisis” in Chinese (and many Asian languages) is composed of two separate word-symbols—one character representing “danger” and the other “opportunity,” we can choose to view the crisis in male identity as occasion for spiritual emergence.

The Greek word krisis in John’s gospel is translated “judgment,” referring to Jesus’ cross, his hour of crisis. Just as Moses lifted up the dangerous serpent on a pole in the wilderness and it became a sign of healing, so the Child of Humanity must be lifted up on a cross (John 3:14). The cross is the end of this One solitary life, yet it becomes a doorway to life eternal for all. In T.S. Eliot’s words, “to make an end is to make a beginning.” This is the Good News we need to hear when coming to the end of a marriage, the end of a career, the end of any relationship. This is the Good News for men, for women, for loved ones, enemies.

The Gospel means that if we “lift up” our most destructive dangers to conscious awareness, praying them instead suppressing them, the crisis can become a window of spiritual opportunity. Prayer is the laboratory of transformation where we actualize this Good News. Prayer means entering the photographic darkroom and lifting up our crises to the Light, so the negatives can become the source of positive prints.

With training in the darkroom or prayer, we can be journeymen photographers! Then we can become mentors for others whose hidden treasure may be the negatives of their lives—if only they knew it! People are looking for journeymen apprenticed in the art of lifting up life’s emergencies to become occasions for spiritual emergence.

Now we are back to our twenty-first century collage. Together, we can apply the spiritual bonding of our stories and begin creating a new collage that represents the transforming Presence among us. What we get from the laboratory of prayer may be only fragmented photos. For this collage we need the varied background materials from folk arts, classical arts—country music, rock, jazz, movies, plays, poetry, fiction—to create rituals where the mundane and profane stuff of life can be “lifted up” in our time. To discern means to train the eyes of the heart to see glimpses of new life in our thwarted opportunities. As the lyrics of Robert Hunter in “Scarlet Begonias” express it, “Once in a while you can get shown the light in the strangest of places if you look at it right.”

Women’s and Men’s Perspectives

Just recently I walked into a large bookstore of a national chain and asked for their section on men’s issues. The manager told me there was no such section, but that a few men’s books were scattered throughout under subtopics like sexuality, work, and self-help. This is despite the fact that the store had a big section on women’s issues and that I was aware of scores of contemporary books on men’s issues. The paltry “scattering” of men’s literature belies our impoverished fragmented male souls. Sam Keen laments a similar experience in Fire in the Belly: On Being a Man.

The burgeoning area of feminist studies, and womanist studies among African American women, is a call for men to pay special attention to our unique issues. Kim Post, who conducts diversity programs for businesses and nonprofits, noted this urgency in a lecture at Chautauqua, New York. Mentioning how many books tell women how to relate to men, but few tell men how better to relate to women, she said,

The so-called mythic-poetic men’s movement draws on ancient myths of the world—books like Robert Bly’s Iron John, Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette’s King, Warrior, Magician, Lover. Journeymen is meant to be a bridge between this movement and the evangelical Promise Keepers. I find a hunger for biblical moorings that integrate being men with being Christian, yet in such a way that preserves dignity and diversity. That is what this book Journeymen is about.

Women are reclaiming unique metaphors of faith and identity from the Bible, literature, and myth, often buried in the centuries-old bastion of dominative male theology and culture. All of us, men and women, are enriched by this process.

For example, the feminine scriptural image of “sufferings as birthpangs” helps me to conceive of personal or cosmic struggles as divine labor pains giving birth to new life. (See Romans 8:18–28; John 16:20–22; Matthew 24:8.) This is not new, for such integrative images often come from male theologians of the mystical tradition. Meister Eckhart often spoke of God as generative, and how “giving birth” always involves disturbance. As I experience the struggles and joys of writing this book, of founding and directing a nonprofit organization, I am sustained by the image of giving birth.

The metaphor of God as Birther suggests the human role of being a midwife. Paul wrote to the Galatians, “My little children, for whom I am in pain of childbirth until Christ is formed in you” (4:19). Genuine spiritual metaphors need look in both directions: Who is God? (theology) and, How shall we then live? (ethics).

Journeymen provides such a model for male spirituality: Christ is the true Mentor; we are apprenticed journeymen becoming mentors.

In Search of a Model for Male Spirituality

A young man was quoted in an interview, “Men are like microwaves and women are like crockpots.” The problem for many of us is that these generalizations just do not work. Reading John Gray’s Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus, my wife and I found more examples of where she was from Mars and I was from Venus! (For example, some men talk a great deal, and not all women are like waves, whose self-esteem crests and falls.) What a great number of men need is a way to move beyond the psychological boxes of male and female, to discover how to integrate the polarities of life yet in such a way that it creates a distinctive collage of male spirituality.

I need an integrative spirituality: the gentle strength symbolized by Aslan the Lion, who represents Christ in C. S. Lewis’ children’s series, The Chronicles of Narnia. I need a “severe mercy” (to use another Lewis image) that cuts through the sexist nonsense and sets me free to embrace my vulnerable side as strength and pay attention to the seismic fissures in my powerful side.

Journeymen provides a model: men becoming aware of unique wounds we have received and given along the way, then rising to return and find in our vulnerability a source to empower self and others.

A Male Spirituality? Two Modes of Experience

So if one rejects the simplistic stereotypes of “male” and “female,” is there a unique male spirituality? I have been asked this many times and still struggle with the issue.

First, I take a clue from biblical stories of male siblings like Cain and Abel (Genesis 4), Jacob and Esau (Genesis 25–33), the Prodigal and the Perfectionist (Luke 15:11–32) that there is no one-size-fits-all male mode of experience, but rather a spectrum. The one endmay be described as (a) the dominative or assertive male mode, and the other as (b) the impoverished or passive male mode. Often the two do battle in the same person. The genuine male soul integrates and balances both of these in a healthy way.

In an unhealthy form, Cain kills his brother Abel. Much male violence results from rapid flipping from feeling impoverished to striking out at world. When someone uses the expression, so-and-so “flipped out,” it conveys an abrupt reaction. Like the late comedian Flip Wilson’s old line, “The devil made me do it!”—that is what happens when you lose your center and surrender to your worst self: You blame others and deny responsibility. Spiritual maturity is to move from uncontrolled “flipping” to discerning a creative use of passiveness and of assertiveness.

Second, I am convinced that both nature (male physical anatomy) and nurture (Western culture) do in fact give men a unique tendency toward outward and linear modes of being in the world. So the key to men’s wholeness lies in balancing our natural dominative propensities by shutting down our mental computers and descending inward to listen to our hearts before there’s a crisis.

The Christ of the Gospels is the model of this holistic integration—retreating to the desert to pray, getting interrupted, then going forth: “Let us go to the neighboring towns… for that is what I came out to do” (Mark 1:35–38, italics mine). In a redeemed form, the “righteous” or integrated man needs the spiritual balance of going out (healthy assertiveness) and returning (healthy passiveness). There are particular male ways of maintaining this balance, as I spell out elsewhere. (3)

Third, studies of men’s and women’s brains show that men and women process information differently: men more rapidly but separately in left and right spheres, women more gradually back and forth. This would indicate that we males need to make use of our rapid responses but also (a.) discipline ourselves to cultivate silences to allow time to integrate information in the two spheres of the brain, and (b.) call on the community to discern a variety of options.

The Bible is full of stories about men that highlight this reality: that if we do not stop to listen to life and the community, life will stop us. We will explore some key parables of Jesus that portray the balance of the soul’s going out (descent, or separation) and returning (ascent, or reintegration). In the story of the Good Samaritan, a man journeys “down” a dangerous road, is wounded, and then is “raised up” on a beast and brought to an inn—home while on the journey (Luke 10:25–37). The Prodigal Son journeys to a far country, gets “down” with the pigs, then comes to himself, rises to return home (Luke 15:11–32). This pattern of descending, rising, and returning is embodied in the church’s liturgy: “Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.”

Such woundings can become a means of gentling our raw male power—like breaking in a horse. Aslan the Lion, the Christ-figure in C. S. Lewis’ Narnia series, is a prototype of gentle strength.

We see this same deep truth in Goethe’s Novelle where the lion (Dyonisian energy) is gentled through the piping of a little child (Apollonian energy). And in the book of Revelation, Christ is simultaneously the Lion and the Lamb.