Chalice Lighting Ceremony
"I invite Linda Fiehler forward [Linda approaches] to light the chalice after I read these words from Sheldon Kopp:
"Once we learn to accept that each of us has both masculine and feminine traits, we can relax both within ourselves and in our relationships with the opposite sex. For some of us, this acceptance is a very difficult core change. But at the end of the passage to acceptance of ourselves, our reward is personal freedom. What a relief to acknowledge that masculine men can be both tough and tender, and that feminine women can be both soft and strong."
As a symbol of our church and heritage, which empower us to become tough and tender, soft and strong, we light this chalice.
Special Dedication of the Men's Wellness Ministry Service
My beloved friend Shoshona Blankman died recently in Albuquerque. We first began our journey together 29 years ago. She was my therapist, guide and cheerleader, who inspired me to pursue men's emotional wellness. I would like to dedicate this service to her.
1st Reading: An except from Chapter 5, "Men's Liberation", in Richard Rohr's From Wild Man to Wise Man: Reflections on Male Spirituality
My very first assignment as a deacon was with the Acoma Native American tribe in New Mexico. Before I drove to visit them, the other Franciscans tried to prepare me for a culture shock by telling me how different these people are. They said that the Acomas are a matriarchal society in which the women are the real leaders of the tribe. It is the women who are strong, who make the decisions and who tell the men what to do. If I wanted to work with these people, I was advised, I would have to learn to work with the women.
Thus forewarned, I spent my initial time at the reservation just observing and listening, trying to learn the social patterns that prevailed among them. After a few weeks, however, it dawned on me that there wasn’t much difference between these people and the folks back home. The only thing different was that the Acoma were honest about the way their society works. The women have the real power and everyone admits it, whereas in white society everyone pretends that men are in charge and women are helpless. We men think we call the shots, but many of the day-to-day decisions that actually control our lives are made by women. Men’s power is largely economic, political and physical, and Jesus would question whether that is power at all, even though there are clear justice issues involved there, too.
An anecdote I read somewhere conveys this idea humorously but pointedly. When asked who makes the decisions in his family, a man replied that his wife makes all the little decisions and she lets him make all the big decisions. Pressed to clarify what he meant by that, he explained, “My wife decides what neighborhood we should live in, what schools are best for the children, how to budget our money, where we should go on vacation, who we socialize with, and things like that. But I decide the big issues, like whether we should trust the Russians, whether the government is doing a good job, and what we should do about the economy.” The story is both funny and sad because the man has obviously been hoodwinked into believing that those are the “big” decisions in his daily life.
Even on the job, most men do not have much power. If they are blue-collar workers, they do what they are told to do, which is usually the same thing over and over again every day. If they are supervisors or managers, there is always some boss higher up telling them what to do and what not to do. If they are salespeople, they are always trying to please their customers. Even if they are executives, most of their so-called decisions are determined by company protocols and policies, by boards of directors and by market forces beyond their control. Most men are paid for doing what someone else wants done. They do not really control their own lives. No wonder so many men become passive, and no wonder that so many men seem to be angry.
2nd Reading: "On Ambiguity", an excerpt from When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times by Pema Chödrän.
When things fall apart and we're on the verge of we know not what, the test for each of us is to stay on that brink and not concretize. The spiritual journey is not about heave and finally getting to a place that's really swell. In fact, that way of looking at things is what keeps us miserable. Thinking that we can find some lasting pleasure and avoid pain is what in Buddism is called 'samsara', a hopeless cycle that goes round and round endlessly and causes us to suffer greatly. The very first noble truth of the Buddha points out that suffering is inevitable for human beings as long as we believe that things last -- that we don't disintegrate, that they can be counted on to satisfy our hunger for security. From this point of view, the only time we ever know what's really going on is when the rug's been pulled out and we can't find anywhere to land. We use these situations either to wake ourselves up or to put ourselves to sleep. Right now -- in the very instant of groundlessness -- is the seed of taking care of those who need our care and of discovering our goodness.
When we think that something is going to bring us pleasure, we don't know what's really going to happen. When we think something is going to give us misery, we don't know. Letting there be room for not knowing is the most important thing of all. We try to do what we think is going to help. But we don't know. We never know if we're going to fall flat or sit up tall. When there's a big disappointment, we don't know if that's the end of the story. It may be just the beginning of a great adventure.
I read somewhere about a family who had only one son. They were very poor. This son was extremely precious to them, and the only thing that mattered to his family was that the bring them some financial support and prestige. The he was thrown from a horse and crippled. It seemed like the end of their lives. Two weeks after that, the army came into the village and took away all the healthy, strong men to fight in the war, and this young man was allowed to stay behind and take care of his family.
Life is like that. We don't know anything. We call something bad; we call it good. But really we just don't know.
Men's Wellness Ministry Sermon
Part I
American men are in a state of crisis.
Look at any headline in the media of late, and the ‘bad behavior’ of males is front and center. They are blamed for violence toward women, violence toward each other, increasing crime statistics, out-of-control behavior, starting wars, destroying the environment, abusing workers. Alternately, their own problems ‘as men’ take a backseat to the issues of women. After 40 years of being told they can’t ‘measure up’ to the standards that females have set for them, men often feel like the ‘rules for relational success’ have so radically changed that they couldn’t achieve them, even if they tried (which many of them are trying to do in earnest).
Let’s look at some of the statistics about how males are acting inappropriately or even criminally, and compare those with what we don’t hear about the problems men face.
(1) The sexual assault statistics, concerning the rape of women, have risen precipitously in recent years, with male-against-female sexual assault being the primary issue.
>> while at the same time, the sexual assault of males, either by their parents or other males, has received far too little attention, including:
-- that the rape of male children is nearly equal to that of female children
-- that the rape of men in the military is actually greater than that of females (52-55% are rapes of
males)
-- that the rape of men in prison is astronomical, and largely ignored and trivialized by our culture.
(2) There are constant reports in the media about the physical assaults of men on women, either in the form of muggings or domestic violence.
>> Yet men are attacked by other men at 4 times the rate that women are attacked by men.
>> And, in spite of the inaccurate statistics presented by the domestic violence movement, that men are responsible for 90% of domestic violence, the actual statistics from the Health and Human Services data are that males and females provoke domestic violence at equal rates, although 70% of the persons who end up in emergency rooms are females, due to the generally greater physical strength of males.
When I took the ‘Raven’ domestic violence advocate program several years ago, I distinctly pointed out this issue to the trainer. She readily acknowledged that I was accurate, but also said “the domestic violence movement quotes those statistics so that we will gain more funding”. In other words, they are showing males as being more “criminal” for grant-producing rationale.
(3) Males are often blamed for being emotionally and physically absentee fathers, for holding back from the display of nurturing feelings toward their partners or children, and for being far too harsh of disciplinarians.
>> Yet, in American society, we continue to raise male children with the expectation that they will be the primary breadwinners in the family (with mothers largely being expected to ‘raise’ the children), which often results, given the hours required to manifest a professional career, little time for being involved as fathers. Thankfully, this is changing, in that in 25% of the households the women are now the primary breadwinners — and they are now experiencing the ‘absentee mother’ syndrome, in reverse.
>> Further, in many families, the females often defer the enforcement of discipline to their male partners, preferring that they (the females) maintain their role as nurturers.
(4) Fathers, who feel increasingly attacked for displaying ‘classic male pride’, often drift off, turn to alcohol or drugs, and fail quite disastrously in their fatherhood role.
>> Fathers often have a difficult time maintaining warm emotional relations with their male children (this is changing, thank god, but only very gradually). The result, for many males in my generation, was poor relational outcomes. Samuel Osherson, in his book Finding Our Fathers: The Unfinished Business of Manhood quotes a study in which, of the 1000 men interviewed, large percentages of the men had experienced physical and/or sexual abuse or emotional disconnection in their relationships with their fathers. Only 15% of the men who were interviewed felt that they had been able to manifest mutually supportive and loving relationships with their fathers.
As Bernie Zilbergeld, in his 1992 book The New Male Sexuality notes:
(5) Women in our culture, given greater access to and allowed greater expression of their emotional life, are also allowed to maintain a close emotional bond with their mothers. (We are all, in this culture, primarily raised by women, but females are encouraged to notice that they are the same sex as their caregivers, and to maintain a close bond, while males are encouraged to break that bond and become ‘independent’).
>> But writers like Jackson Pollack have shown that forcing young male children to ‘step away from their mothers’ -- even while their sisters are not forced into such a traumatic emotional split -- produces emotionally painful and traumatic outcomes for those boys, something that our culture continues to ignore or trivialize.
>> And the result for boys is that they have major problems with relationship skills, given that, unlike females, they have been taught that either painful or loving feelings are not appropriate to express.
(6) Women have had, since the dawn of the latest Women’s Movement, greater expectations that men “openly display their emotions”, much the way their female friends do, and “get in touch with their deeper feelings”, as a standard by which to judge a man’s emotional adequacy.
>> And yet, for too long, the only emotion that men were allowed in our culture was anger. Tender feelings were put down as being ‘female emotions’ and men who expressed them were too often seen as ‘sissies’.
>> Additionally, men who have the courage and forthrightness to show their angst openly, who cry, or display tender feelings, are just as often ‘put down’ as ‘being less than men’ by their female partners, who are just as confused by the socio-sexual changes as many males are. (See bell hooks, quotes from my favorite book.)
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Now, you might quite reasonably ask whether I’m saying that males are victims to the same degree as females, or if their oppression is synonymous to that of women.
And my response is this: The problem is that we are ALL raised in a patriarchal society. Clearly, in such a culture, males generally have greater advantages than women -- socially, economically, politically, etc.
Yet to say that ‘males as a group’ have greater power than ‘females as a group’ does not equate to ALL males feeling powerful nor all women feeling powerless. There are greater differences among men or among women than there are between men and women.
To further quote Bernie Zilbergeld:
“I am not trying to say that men suffer more or have it rougher than women. Both sexes suffer and pay enormous prices in today’s world.
What I am saying is that men, too, deserve understanding, sympathy, and support. Their lot is not the bowl of cherries we have been led to believe. Unfortunately, men don’t get much understanding because they have a hard time making a case for themselves, for expressing what is going on with them and how they feel about it. Which is exactly what we’d expect from people brought up the way we bring up our boys.”
Part II
So...
Let’s look at that very point -- “the way we bring up our boys”. And how we can address this issue in a manner than encourages the ‘nurturing men’s emotional wellness’.
We live in a culture that teaches males to be uncomfortable with their feelings. Young boys are often encouraged, by both fathers & mothers, to suppress their feelings of angst.
Many people are aware of, or have engaged in, a conversation with their sons or other young males when, upon falling down and hurting themselves, those young boys have cried out in pain. And adults around them say “Be a man, don’t cry!”
The trouble is that we say that hundreds of times to boys throughout their childhoods (and continue to express it to them in the adulthoods) — and I posit that what we are actually saying to males is “when you feel pain, ignore it”, “when you feel angst in your life, stuff the pain”. And that often results in males in our society not learning, in a proactive manner, the ‘language of feelings’ that young females are less likely to be stopped from acknowledging.
The major problem with this cultural demand is that men, like women, indeed do have feelings. We live in a culture that assumes that men are devoid of tender, nurturing feelings, that they are motivated solely by ‘logic’ and mental processes, that ‘feelings’ are a purview of females only.
And I say to you: that image of maleness is destructive and abusive to males. It IS true that males in America are taught to be uncomfortable with their feelings (at least all feelings other than anger and bravado), but to say that men don’t have feelings is to ignore the human qualities that we all share.
I’ve often thought of the scenario where I’m talking to a heterosexual couple and I say, to the husband “So, John, tell me how you feel about the issue we are discussing today.” And John says, in complete confidence, “Ask my wife how I feel.” Now, it could be that John is being patriarchal and assumes his wife has to speak for him. But what I would emphasize is that, more often than not, John really and truly doesn’t know what he ‘feels’ and is hoping his wife does. And, indeed, since women are better at and more comfortable with the expression of feelings, quite often she knows exactly how he ‘feels’ even if he doesn’t.
Lilian Rubin, in her book Intimate Strangers, written many years ago (but still quite accurate) discusses some statistics on divorce rates in America. She notes that as heterosexual marriages are falling apart, males often casually cast them off, and stop putting in the effort to keep the relationship going. But within a year after the divorce, the men are remarried. On the other hand, females often fight tooth-and-nail to keep the marriage going, and put a wealth of effort into the process. But if and once the marriage dissolves and leads to divorce, females statistically don’t remarry for another five years. Her point, and the one I would emphasize here about men’s feelings, is that men need women in their lives to express their feelings for them, and in fact are often lost without that connection. Whereas, alternately, women are quite good at expressing feelings, and while they may seek a male partner for economic support, they don’t need them to have perfectly vital friendships with other people.
Which, of course, flies in the face of the assumption that men are ‘independent’ and women are ‘dependent’. Which is exactly the issue that Richard Rohr discussed in his reading this morning.
Hence, a focus of this Ministry will be to teach men how to express their feelings and how to become comfortable with that expression. And to teach men and women that it’s positive, for all of us, that men have access to not just their anger, but also to the nurturing aspects of their feelings, both for themselves, for their families and friends, and for the larger community.
Part 3
So... how do I propose to address the ‘nurturing of men’s emotional wellness’ in a proactive way?
Here are the goals of the Men’s Wellness Ministry:
The Ministry, through the Chair or selected members of a Men’s Wellness Team, will provide:
• Men’s Wellness & Male Sexual Abuse Survivor sessions, one or more per year;
• Facilitation of an ongoing Men’s Group, whose focus will be on emotional growth;
• A Six week course on Men’s Wellness, offered at least once every three years;
• An interracial men’s group, focused on cross-cultural communication
• A male-female communication group (assuming I can find a female co-facilitator who has similar views)
• Personalized men’s emotional wellness coaching
• and periodic sermons on issues pertinent to UU Men’s Wellness, at least one per year.
Which I realize is an ambitious wealth of responsibilities to address. But without challenge, is life really worth living??
However, let me emphasize that the Men’s Wellness Ministry isn’t for men alone. All of the following groups are the focus of this Ministry:
- People who were born as males
- Those who identify as male
- Those who have run away or escaped from their maleness
- Those who have been hurt by male behavior and acculturation
- Those who are in relationship with males — as brothers, partners, spouses, employers, uncles, grandfathers, etc.
- And those males who have struggled with the dominant culture’s definition of masculinity, i.e. “what it means to ‘be a man’”, and find the ‘standard model’, of how to approach that life journey, to be lacking.
Which, as I’m sure you can tell, includes pretty much the whole population!
Part IV - Conclusion of MWM Sermon
Finally, to bring this sermon to a conclusion, I want to bring us full-circle from one of the earlier readings.
Danny read a quote from Pema Chödrän on “not knowing”, or what I think of as “gracefully accepting the power of ambiguity”. There is so much in this life that is unknowable, that is random, beyond our human understanding, beyond our human capacity to have ‘conclusive’ answers. Accepting that life just “is” and that “stuff happens” that is completely out of our control, is one of the more powerful elements of spiritual and soulful liberation.
Yet, we live in a culture where males are told, by females and other males, and often as self-talk to themselves, that they are supposed to know all the answers to the problems that arise in daily life. The problem is that, often, they don’t have much of any of the answers, and are, frankly, just as lost as everyone else.
Unfortunately, this is a powerful piece of the cultural assumptions we make about males in our patriarchal society, and it becomes part of the mythos about “what it means to be a man”. We place an enormous demand on males “to know” how the world is constructed, how to solve the dilemmas in organizations, how to solve disputes in relationships, etc. And frankly, this is, from my perspective, a profound disservice to men.
Hence, I would posit here that 3 of the most empowering words males in our society could say, that would lead to their liberation and the opening of clearer and more fluid discussions, are “I Don’t Know” when asked for answers to questions that they clearly don’t have any realistic knowledge about.
Admitting that “I Don’t Know”, rather than coming up with an answer, could be the greatest relief from emotional burdens that most males have available in this life!
It’s sort of like the old joke about what one gets in cross-breeding an elephant and a rhinoceros: and the answer is “el-e-phi-no” (hell if I know).
Hence, I would stress, in conclusion, that by admitting that they just don’t know, men would be encouraging a more free-form, mutual, communal discussion to take place, one which would equitably allow for investment in the outcome by all parties in the conversation.
So, let’s try it right now: to the males in this audience, please repeat after me: I DON’T KNOW.
Let’s do that again: I DON’T KNOW!
See -- that wasn’t so hard. Sort of rolls right off your tongue!
Thank you for listening this morning.
Benediction
The Women’s Movement encouraged females to get in touch with their masculine energy and to forthrightly express their anger. I laud that. The Men’s Movement and this Ministry encourages males to get in touch with their feminine, nurturant energy and to forthrightly express their tender feelings.
Don’t worry — those feelings are in there!
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Here is the audio link to this Men's Wellness Ministry sermon: http://firstuustlouis.org/media/1228
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