Shame and Men
Before I begin I would like to say something about males and shame. There is overwhelming evidence that boys and men are quite sensitive to being shamed and to feeling the effects of shame. Most males would rather choose solitude than stay in a situation in which they experience shame. Men tend to distance themselves from all kinds of sources of shame. However, in so doing they often move so far away from the things and people that could be vital in their lives that they become emotional loners unable to connect with others. Religion has a particular role in this and in what follows I am hoping to show some of the features of this role.
Men in Religious Organizations
World-wide the numbers of men who are members of religious organizations are dropping. This is not only true for Christian denominations of all colors and tastes as well as the two other major Abrahamic religions (Islam and Judaism), but it is also true for non-Western religions such as Buddhism, Hinduism, Shintoism and the many other religions that have, in the course, of history emerged in the world. It seems that the forces of secularization have had a particularly strong effect on the precept shared by many religions: that of an absolute Other, a God or transcendent being or beings, who have ultimate reign over the world.
I believe that this tendency is detrimental to men as a healthy spirituality is an important part of an overall healthy life. Without faith and spiritual connectedness men lack ways of expressing their thoughts and feelings about death, creation, love, awe, experiences of an infinite nature and others. I am finding in my practice that men as a group seem to have experienced a strong decline of their ability to speak about these topics meaningfully. Their language and thinking seems to have gone through a kind of impoverishment. What’s left is quite often nothing but the next day at work, the next pay-raise, the next conquest of some sort. Men have become restless and yet apathetic, likely to resort to quick quasi religious experiences like drugs and alcohol and sex.
Unfortunately, most religions respond to this decline by shaming and threatening those who are outside of its boundaries. Men don’t respond well to those strategies. Some might join for a while, some might join even for their whole life. However, I have found that even those who stay begin to feel resentful of the very structures they are a part of as they feel that those structures are coercive, shaming, and therefore, a threat to their freedom. This is another way of saying that organized religion has mostly let men down, even when it has rewarded male membership with leadership positions and a powerful visibility of males at the top of their hierarchies. Many of those men lead double-lives. The scandals of sex-abuse in the Catholic Church are only one example of how shaming and threatening can debilitate a church from within. Similar abuses of power within faith structures can be found in religions across the board. Again and again, the riddle of why this happens, why often, too often, men seem to be involved in these abuses, finds its answer in the very shaming and life-denying structures that are set up by many religions. As long as individual religions believe in their own, absolute right to know the one way towards salvation, they will inevitably collide with how many men want to lead their lives today. As long as religions pursue often shaming ways of convincing men (and women) that it is better to be part of a religion (and even better, if they’re, part of the “right” one) than to stand outside of accepted religious structures they will lose male members or only keep those who stand to gain from the place the powerstructures have given them. More and more men report that religious participation to them is either painfully boring or painfully shaming. Neither one of these two are appealing experiences they would like to consider part of their lives.
Again, quite unfortunately, some religions have sought to remedy this by speaking to men about religion in more “male” terms. Somewhat in the vein of war-time propaganda men are now appealed to by talk about “true causes” “the war on x” and phrases like “freedom-fighters” “soldiers of peace”, etc. The truth is that while more men than in previous years might join religious organizations, Christian or other, the promise is illusory that they will be fighting for the true cause, connected with the promise that they will be righteous in the eyes of the God. Ultimately, these causes will prove (and have proven) to be damaging to the male psyche in ways that are deep and lasting. True faith and religiosity in men do not express themselves in a fight or struggle for dominance with others. That men continue to be abused for such purposes by means of religious thought and propaganda is one of the greatest calamities of religious thinking everywhere.
Faith, Spirituality and Religion
Before we can turn our attention to the role faith plays in men’s lives, it will be necessary to become just a bit clearer on what is meant by faith. We are especially in need of understanding why it makes sense to talk about men and faith and not merely about men and spirituality or men and religion.
Though all three terms overlap in significant ways, it is worth pointing out that neither religion nor spirituality carry with them the subjective sense of having a concrete object in the way the term “faith” does. Faith is always faith in something or someone. Faith has an aim. It has intent and direction. Both spirituality and religion, on the other hand, carry with them a broader and wider connectedness with the world. Both can exist without ever expressing a particular faith in anything. Spirituality and religion are general while faith is specific. While many scholars would argue with me on this point, I strongly believe that faith and spirituality can exist without each other. (It is quite possible, in other words, to find a man who has a strong faith, but shows few signs of an overall sense of spirituality. It is equally possible to encounter someone who is strongly connected to the world spiritually, but has little or no faith in a specific being or event or even set of principles.) However, I also believe that faith and spirituality can be especially powerful, if they come together in an individual or a group of people. In this case, they can form a particularly strong religious attitude.
My choice of the term “faith” rather than one of the other two, then, already points to a certain way in which I see men approach the world and the possibility of an absolute that somehow impacts this world. I believe that men are constantly in search of a specific other—an absolute—that will give meaning to their lives, structure their lives and give them stability. Men are in search either of a father or mother and, sometimes, they are in search of both. However, men are also quite suspicious of themselves as they go about this search, always ready to recant and recoil in shame from having been tricked or fooled, or, simply, because they were looking.
A client of mine, for example, used to point to a quote from the Hebrew Bible, the book of Joshuah. The quote was simple “as for me and my family, we will follow the lord.” In his personal life my client was looking at much chaos in his family. His wife was severely mentally ill with a personality disorder. He certainly didn’t expect to be loved by her in any of the ways he had imagined he would be loved by a woman. One of his daughters was beginning to show signs of anti-social tendencies that should a few years later blossom into huge and sometimes terrifying intra-familial conflicts. But this client managed his life with faith. Following the lord for him meant that he would never divorce his wife or leave his family. A stubborn faith one might say, one that didn’t allow him to cry out for the nurturing he so much wanted to receive. Yet, there was shame in this faith as well. He wondered about his constant need for nurturing and love. This factored into great doubts he had about himself and his faith. Perhaps, he wondered, I have just been wrong about this faith thing. Would I be able to build a new, better life, if I followed my need for love? But then, from the perspective of faith, his need for love and nurturing looked infantile and immature, shameful also, and he had to reject it as well. In essence he had become a prisoner of his own faith with no place to move.
And this is my point exactly: a man’s choice of religious attitude, either as faith or spirituality, is often informed by what he feels is more of an embarrassment. When it is about faith it is often about discipline, structure, steadfastness, loyalty and judgment. Yet to need order and structure can also be seen as an embarrassing admission of incompetence, one that men often are not prepared to make. When it is about spirituality, however, admitting that they are believers because they are seekers of nurturing, love and the warmth of a lasting embrace is equally embarrassing because it, once again, sheds shameful shadows on a man’s ability to lead a man’s life.
So, while many men are clearly in need and search of a way to express and reflect on the religious dimensions of their lives, doing so, either through strong faith or spirituality, is fraught with problems for them. For many men religion remains a shameful affair. It is anathema to them and they will reject it in favor of a more self-determined way of life. It is in this way that men often end up with neither faith nor spirituality.
Shameful Faith
In my experience faith or any religious attitude in men is often accompanied by a feeling of embarrassment or shame on the part of the man. Men are certainly more likely to speak freely about work, their upbringing, sex and their relationships than they are to speak about their faith. My overall sense is that faith often doesn’t leave much room for a man to protect his dignity. Concepts of sin, judgment and punishment as well as concepts of eternal love stand in diametrical conflict with what many men think of as their own code of honor. I will first use some of the insights of Sigmund Freud to discuss how this may have come about. I will then demonstrate some of the more subtle ways in which shaming pervades religious discourse by taking a look at a passage from Thomas Merton.
Sigmund Freud
Among his many legacies Freud left us one that certainly was a sign of his time, viz. a thoroughly anti-religious attitude. Since the time of the enlightenment religion in Europe had suffered a decline because, increasingly, it had become something to be seen as a dimension of the human psyche rather than of a reality that is absolutely different from human existence. As such it was only a matter of time until someone would make the claim that the human psyche was just as well off without the construct of religion as it was, perhaps, well off without the concept of Santa Claus.
Most notable in the many critical voices that began to be heard all over Europe, albeit—remarkably—not in America, was the sentiment that religion was a way of infantilizing oneself or keeping others infantilized. Freud was not alone with his opinion. Names like Schopenhauer, Marx, Feuerbach, Nietzsche—to name only a few of the more famous ones—belong into the chorus of anti-religious sentiment. All, more or less, share this view: religion is undignified because it is the epitome of what Immanuel Kant 100 years earlier had called “our self-imposed immaturity.” This is the stream of thought into which Freud sets his foot in the early twentieth century.
Thus, when I go about quoting and analyzing Freud’s work below I am doing so not because I believe that he is the only one who influenced our attitudes toward religion in this way. Rather, I’m doing it because his words, likely quite unintentionally, reflect with such remarkable clarity on the inner struggle I have been observing in men as they go about understanding the coordinates of their position vis-à-vis faith. This also means that it is quite likely that Freud voiced his own misgivings about religion not so much as a scholar but also as a male who had suffered religion in his own life, both as a boy and a man.
So, as we begin to listen to Freud’s remarks I want to invite you to listen to them, in particular, from the perspective of the many things we have learned about men in the last few months. Listen to them from the perspective of what it means to be a man.
In a summary of his book Future Of An Illusion he remarks
I was much less concerned with the deepest sources of the religious feeling than with what the common man understands by his religion—with the system of doctrines and promises which on the one hand explains to him the riddles of this world with enviable completeness, and, on the other, assures him that a careful Providence will watch over his life and will compensate him in a future existence of any frustrations he suffers here. The common man cannot imagine this Providence otherwise than in the figure of an enormously exalted father. Only such a being can understand the needs of the children of men and be softened by their prayers and placated by the signs of their remorse. The whole thing is so patently infantile, so foreign to reality, that to anyone with a friendly attitude to humanity it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of life.
You can see that Freud’s basic assumption was that religion was a regression to a more infantile stage of being. In it we are looking to be nurtured and loved. Why does he think that? His main contention is that an adult would simply no longer experience the kind of helplessness and powerlessness that characterizes the infant’s emotional situation. Freud calls the feelings and needs that arise from such powerlessness “oceanic feelings”. So, while such feelings may still exist in adults they don’t really correspond to a realistic need that any adult might or should have. Religion is, in other words, a construct that does not respond to a true adult feeling. Ideally, adults should no longer have oceanic feelings, but should instead be able to respond to and manage their needs in mature and realistic ways. We might add that Freud probably also includes in this the need for scientific explanations which, since science does a good job at finding them, is no longer a necessary thing needed from religion.
So, given the strong separation of adulthood from childhood, of maturity from immaturity, Freud argues that the only logical explanation for why religion exists at all is that feelings of the oceanic kind have been maintained artificially.
The derivation of religious needs from the infant’s helplessness and the longing for the father aroused by it seems to me incontrovertible, especially since the feeling is not simply prolonged from childhood days, but is permanently sustained by fear of the superior power of Fate. I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for father’s protection.
The oceanic feeling and its concomitant need for protection are, in other words, a result of an artificial believe in and fear of fate. Here Freud takes us one step further into the emergence of religion, from religious feelings per se to the emergence of monotheism, those religions, in other words, that worship one god. How does he get there?
Freud’s basic argument is that that the “oceanic feeling” in no way satisfies our basic need for real protection. Freud submits that such protection can only come from a “father”, i.e., a strong person that can protect us “from the superior power of fate.” Yet, and this is the true hitch for Freud as far as religions are concerned, such a search for a father is a basic admission of one’s own lack of authenticity and authority. He believes that faith and religion ultimately undermine our dignity as thinking, decision-making beings, for they force us to surrender all real hope for pleasure and happiness and substitute as the only source of pleasure our own “suffering” and “unconditional submission.”
Freud’s critique of religion, then, turns out to be a critique in particular of monotheism, and there in particular of the monotheism of the Abrahamic kind. But, and this is crucial for our understanding of men and faith, Freud’s critique comes as a critique of the father. He identifies adult religion with a prolonged and unhealthy longing for a father. He thinks of such yearning as submission and infantile regression. Any self-respecting person, but especially every self-respecting male should see that longing for a father in this way stands in diametrical opposition to the task and need of one’s independence and self-sufficiency.
Freud’s views are instructive for us, because they give us a frame-work for understanding men in a religious context. Men neither want to be infantilized (a possibility Freud quite certainly associates with a regression to the maternal care of the infant) nor do they normally want to submit to someone or something in order to experience pleasure (a possibility Freud certainly associates with the disciplining hand of the father). Given this polarized view of religion and adding what we already know about men—viz. that they would stay away from both poles—we can see that there simply is no place for men in religion. Of course, if the current wars are an indication of what men choose, if they have to, they are more likely to choose submission and suffering as a form of pleasure than spirituality and oceanic feeling.
This means that for men—according to Freud—contact with religion is always tormented contact. It is always fraught with critical questions regarding his maturity, his will to power and his willingness to go it by himself. The inner psychic conflict that emerges from a confrontation with faith and religion is a conflict that circumscribes a man’s attempts to emancipate himself both from the sphere of the maternal and the sphere of the paternal.
As noted above and corroborated by conversations with men in my practice more men are likely to choose a faith that emphasizes submission and discipline than one that emphasizes universal connectedness, nurturing and love. Male faith is often aware of and afraid of judgment and punishment rather than forgiveness and mercy. Men, in other words, are more likely to choose a harsher variety of faith. One in which they have to prove their perseverance, righteousness and willingness to obey God. Of course, proving this also means that men will not complain while they are out to prove these things. Male faith often carries with itself traits of martyrdom, i.e., a silent acceptance of the pain that has been inflicted on them. Silent it is for religious reasons. Wailing about it would, ultimately, show a man’s weakness and inability to follow God’s will. This, by the way, holds true in all religions that see themselves centered around a God or Gods. It includes, of course, the Abrahamic religions, but also Hinduism, many African religions as well as some American Indian religions. In all of them the man of faith is the man who can endure and bear pain and even uses pain as a means of religious purification.
Thomas Merton
The need for something real and the protection that such connection with reality can have from shame can be seen in more subtle ways in the writings and teachings of many religious men. Take, for example, the case of Thomas Merton
The great theologian and religious mystic in his book Thoughts In Solitude reminds us that
There is no greater disaster in the spiritual life than to be immersed in unreality, for life is maintained and nourished in us by our vital relation with realities outside and above us. When our life feeds on unreality, it must starve. It must, therefore, die. There is no greater misery than to mistake this fruitless death for the true, fruitful and sacrificial “death” by which we enter into life.
Putting this into plain male language I would translate Merton’s passage in this way:
There is no greater failure than to be fooled about what’s real and what is not. If I want to be real I need to do/be in touch with real things. When we are connected with things that are not real, we become weak and will be killed. There is no greater embarrassment than to be killed for something we thought was real that turns out to be not-real. However, if something is a true cause (i.e., real), it’s worth dying for.
My translation of Merton’s words highlights shame as one of the most vulnerable issues in a man’s psychic constitution and in his search for faith. It is simply shameful to be mistaken. Especially when it is about something so important and vital as how to lead a spiritual life or a life of faith. How different could this passage have sounded, had Merton thought of taking out the words “disaster” and “misery” and, instead, said “sometimes it happens that we think something is real and it turns out it is not.” How different could this passage have sounded had he said “no big deal; forgive yourself; understand what went wrong and do it differently the next time. God loves you.” How immeasurably great would it have been, had he chosen to omit the verbiage about death (fruitless or sacrificial) and instead talked about life unambiguously? Such talk, by the way, would have included much attention to the subject of dying. But it would have stayed away from putting a judgment on the kind of death someone dies.
While Merton’s insights about immersion in unreality were clearly not meant to be about men only, they come to have a peculiar application to the state of men and faith. I believe that for many men it is the fear of what Merton calls “immersion in unreality” that keeps them distanced from traditional faith options and in search of a more meaningful, more moving and more invigorating faith.
Unfortunately, men’s need for being connected to something real, often ends up with men choosing suffering and pain over nurturing, war over peace, battle over conversation. Many men are looking for “the true cause” or the “sacrificial death” rather than a fruitless one.
Interestingly, faith for most men is rarely of a solely contemplative nature. Few men are satisfied to simply pray, fast, meditate and then pray some more. However, if they can do these things by causing themselves to suffer significantly, they might be more inclined to engage in these activities. What I mean is this, if men can find enough pain, i.e., a way of competing either against themselves or others in their exercise of prayer, fast and meditation they might feel more inclined to engage in it as an “activity of faith.” Again, we come up against the particularly male way of approaching the world through pain and surviving pain.
Men’s connection with nature
Throughout my practice and certainly also in my own life I have observed that men often are highly attracted to a connection with nature as a link to their own experience of something that goes beyond themselves. It is probably true that more men find something akin to spiritual happiness in nature than anywhere else in their lives (golfing not excluded). What is it about nature that has such magnetic appeal for men?
I think our understanding of Freud’s view on religion can be helpful. While it is possible to live in tune with, if not attuned to, nature, it certainly cannot be said that nature is a nurturing and loving sphere into which a man simply has to let himself fall in order to be saved. Quite to the contrary, the man who encounters nature unprepared will, most certainly, die! Being in tune with nature requires skill, talent and practice—in some cases even a little cunning and trickery. On the other hand, however, nature will never seem like an arbitrary force to which a man simply will have to submit, if he wants to be attuned to it. No, it is precisely this struggle with nature that makes it a masculine environment. Nature is not giving, but it is certainly also not taking. Whether a man emerges from nature with his dignity intact or violated depends solely on him. Nature simply is what it is. It acts in accordance with its own laws. Nature doesn’t judge. Nature doesn’t punish. In a way it could be said that nature lives its own stoic ways and, as such, becomes an example for how many men would like to live.
This, by the way, is quite different from how many American Indian men have looked at nature. To them nature is not a stoic other, but rather an enchanted universe. One in which Gods have to be satisfied, appeased and, on occasion, tricked in order to make it through. Nature in the American Indian view is moral. It responds to the wrong-doings of men and women by punishing it with droughts, storms, blizzards and floods. This is precisely not the “nature” many men are looking for when they embark on a nature experience. To them, nature is about a struggle for survival. In this struggle their force is no different from the force of the wind or the rain. The only question is who will supersede.
Immersion in nature, in other words, is without shame. There is no embarrassment or shame about having fallen into the arms of a nurturing maternal force. But there also isn’t a trace of the shame and embarrassment of having submitted and put oneself into the service of a disciplining paternal force.
Faith and Religion Without Shame
I believe that religion and faith cannot be passed on. They are decisions that are made individually and are part of a person’s ripening sense of the world and its limits and, perhaps, its sense of connectedness to an absolute about which we cannot say much that could be taken as truth by others. Rather, we can only talk about our own experience. Faith is always absolutely subjective.
For example, if I believe that there is a God who sits in judgment of my actions and that I should take this judgment into consideration when I act and decide, I might talk about this to my children, but it would be wrong to force them to frame their own actions in the same way. The experience that there might be an absolute power, benevolent or not, is an experience that can only come out of the experience of the limits of one’s own thinking and existence. I consider regular exchanges about such things with our children part of the way in which we can teach them faith and spirituality without shame.
Such exchanges include three general topic areas which each can have several sub-topics. These areas are
a) the limits of our existence
b) aesthetic experiences
c) ethical experiences
d) a combination of these three
In all cases our exchanges are done best and most effectively when we speak about our subjective experiences rather than some allegedly objective precept that everyone should follow. Above all else, though, it is important that we speak without shame and shaming.
Recently I had a conversation with my two older sons. We had dropped off our van at the shop and were walking the two miles home. It was about 8:30pm, dark and the last part of the walk led across a local cemetery. We drive past this cemetery almost every day. It’s rather large, but stuck between a Meineke and across from a car-dealership and a porn-shop just down the road we hardly pay attention to it. This time we did. As we entered it, we realized that what had looked like just a grassy area was actually crowded with flat tomb-stones, one next to the other. I reminded them that it was important not to step on any of these stones. We walked in farther and found tombstones from two centuries ago, old and withered, the writing barely legible anymore. We thought about what Urbana must have looked like when these people were alive. What were they thinking, feeling, wondering, worrying, laughing about?
Then came the question: Papa, what kind of tombstone would you like to have? I thought for a moment. This is a conversation I had with my father. I know what he wants, actually, a natural stone with just his name carved in it. So, I said to Noah, who had asked the question, I think I’d like something simple. Perhaps just a rock or a cross. Definitely not something carved and polished. And, I said, perhaps my name and birthdate, and a small thing you guys would like to say about me.
I think I would like something that’s shaped like a couch, Noah said, so that when someone comes to visit me there they sit down and talk with me. Jacob chimed in saying I’d like something like a tree-stump. No writing, just something that looks like nature. And, as always keen to match—if not trump—what his older brother says, if someone comes to visit my grave they can sit in the grass.
There is so much to say about this anecdote. But I would like to highlight just a few things that, in my opinion, are meaningful for the development of faith and spirituality in men.
a) as boys they need to have strong connections with their father
b) they need to feel and understand their father’s faith and beliefs.
c) experiences with each other, their father and other friends where reflection about others, past and future times can emerge
d) openness about death, spiritual questions, etc.
e) there needs to be an absence of shame/shaming in how they relate to each other
f) awe and other experiences of the infinite (through music, art, nature, etc.) need to be shared often
g) strong respect for others, their lives, their decisions, their ways of life.
h) A good sense of the balance between passion and task-orientedness on the one hand and the ability to let go on the other.
You might have noticed that I didn’t say anything about God, commandments, religious precepts, rules of holiness, etc. I only spoke about the world and how we live in it. If we can teach boys and men these things, if we can speak convincingly of how living mindfully, can be a way of living faithfully and without shame, then all talk of God and diving will merely be an afterthought, to be thought or not to be thought.
Before I begin I would like to say something about males and shame. There is overwhelming evidence that boys and men are quite sensitive to being shamed and to feeling the effects of shame. Most males would rather choose solitude than stay in a situation in which they experience shame. Men tend to distance themselves from all kinds of sources of shame. However, in so doing they often move so far away from the things and people that could be vital in their lives that they become emotional loners unable to connect with others. Religion has a particular role in this and in what follows I am hoping to show some of the features of this role.
Men in Religious Organizations
World-wide the numbers of men who are members of religious organizations are dropping. This is not only true for Christian denominations of all colors and tastes as well as the two other major Abrahamic religions (Islam and Judaism), but it is also true for non-Western religions such as Buddhism, Hinduism, Shintoism and the many other religions that have, in the course, of history emerged in the world. It seems that the forces of secularization have had a particularly strong effect on the precept shared by many religions: that of an absolute Other, a God or transcendent being or beings, who have ultimate reign over the world.
I believe that this tendency is detrimental to men as a healthy spirituality is an important part of an overall healthy life. Without faith and spiritual connectedness men lack ways of expressing their thoughts and feelings about death, creation, love, awe, experiences of an infinite nature and others. I am finding in my practice that men as a group seem to have experienced a strong decline of their ability to speak about these topics meaningfully. Their language and thinking seems to have gone through a kind of impoverishment. What’s left is quite often nothing but the next day at work, the next pay-raise, the next conquest of some sort. Men have become restless and yet apathetic, likely to resort to quick quasi religious experiences like drugs and alcohol and sex.
Unfortunately, most religions respond to this decline by shaming and threatening those who are outside of its boundaries. Men don’t respond well to those strategies. Some might join for a while, some might join even for their whole life. However, I have found that even those who stay begin to feel resentful of the very structures they are a part of as they feel that those structures are coercive, shaming, and therefore, a threat to their freedom. This is another way of saying that organized religion has mostly let men down, even when it has rewarded male membership with leadership positions and a powerful visibility of males at the top of their hierarchies. Many of those men lead double-lives. The scandals of sex-abuse in the Catholic Church are only one example of how shaming and threatening can debilitate a church from within. Similar abuses of power within faith structures can be found in religions across the board. Again and again, the riddle of why this happens, why often, too often, men seem to be involved in these abuses, finds its answer in the very shaming and life-denying structures that are set up by many religions. As long as individual religions believe in their own, absolute right to know the one way towards salvation, they will inevitably collide with how many men want to lead their lives today. As long as religions pursue often shaming ways of convincing men (and women) that it is better to be part of a religion (and even better, if they’re, part of the “right” one) than to stand outside of accepted religious structures they will lose male members or only keep those who stand to gain from the place the powerstructures have given them. More and more men report that religious participation to them is either painfully boring or painfully shaming. Neither one of these two are appealing experiences they would like to consider part of their lives.
Again, quite unfortunately, some religions have sought to remedy this by speaking to men about religion in more “male” terms. Somewhat in the vein of war-time propaganda men are now appealed to by talk about “true causes” “the war on x” and phrases like “freedom-fighters” “soldiers of peace”, etc. The truth is that while more men than in previous years might join religious organizations, Christian or other, the promise is illusory that they will be fighting for the true cause, connected with the promise that they will be righteous in the eyes of the God. Ultimately, these causes will prove (and have proven) to be damaging to the male psyche in ways that are deep and lasting. True faith and religiosity in men do not express themselves in a fight or struggle for dominance with others. That men continue to be abused for such purposes by means of religious thought and propaganda is one of the greatest calamities of religious thinking everywhere.
Faith, Spirituality and Religion
Before we can turn our attention to the role faith plays in men’s lives, it will be necessary to become just a bit clearer on what is meant by faith. We are especially in need of understanding why it makes sense to talk about men and faith and not merely about men and spirituality or men and religion.
Though all three terms overlap in significant ways, it is worth pointing out that neither religion nor spirituality carry with them the subjective sense of having a concrete object in the way the term “faith” does. Faith is always faith in something or someone. Faith has an aim. It has intent and direction. Both spirituality and religion, on the other hand, carry with them a broader and wider connectedness with the world. Both can exist without ever expressing a particular faith in anything. Spirituality and religion are general while faith is specific. While many scholars would argue with me on this point, I strongly believe that faith and spirituality can exist without each other. (It is quite possible, in other words, to find a man who has a strong faith, but shows few signs of an overall sense of spirituality. It is equally possible to encounter someone who is strongly connected to the world spiritually, but has little or no faith in a specific being or event or even set of principles.) However, I also believe that faith and spirituality can be especially powerful, if they come together in an individual or a group of people. In this case, they can form a particularly strong religious attitude.
My choice of the term “faith” rather than one of the other two, then, already points to a certain way in which I see men approach the world and the possibility of an absolute that somehow impacts this world. I believe that men are constantly in search of a specific other—an absolute—that will give meaning to their lives, structure their lives and give them stability. Men are in search either of a father or mother and, sometimes, they are in search of both. However, men are also quite suspicious of themselves as they go about this search, always ready to recant and recoil in shame from having been tricked or fooled, or, simply, because they were looking.
A client of mine, for example, used to point to a quote from the Hebrew Bible, the book of Joshuah. The quote was simple “as for me and my family, we will follow the lord.” In his personal life my client was looking at much chaos in his family. His wife was severely mentally ill with a personality disorder. He certainly didn’t expect to be loved by her in any of the ways he had imagined he would be loved by a woman. One of his daughters was beginning to show signs of anti-social tendencies that should a few years later blossom into huge and sometimes terrifying intra-familial conflicts. But this client managed his life with faith. Following the lord for him meant that he would never divorce his wife or leave his family. A stubborn faith one might say, one that didn’t allow him to cry out for the nurturing he so much wanted to receive. Yet, there was shame in this faith as well. He wondered about his constant need for nurturing and love. This factored into great doubts he had about himself and his faith. Perhaps, he wondered, I have just been wrong about this faith thing. Would I be able to build a new, better life, if I followed my need for love? But then, from the perspective of faith, his need for love and nurturing looked infantile and immature, shameful also, and he had to reject it as well. In essence he had become a prisoner of his own faith with no place to move.
And this is my point exactly: a man’s choice of religious attitude, either as faith or spirituality, is often informed by what he feels is more of an embarrassment. When it is about faith it is often about discipline, structure, steadfastness, loyalty and judgment. Yet to need order and structure can also be seen as an embarrassing admission of incompetence, one that men often are not prepared to make. When it is about spirituality, however, admitting that they are believers because they are seekers of nurturing, love and the warmth of a lasting embrace is equally embarrassing because it, once again, sheds shameful shadows on a man’s ability to lead a man’s life.
So, while many men are clearly in need and search of a way to express and reflect on the religious dimensions of their lives, doing so, either through strong faith or spirituality, is fraught with problems for them. For many men religion remains a shameful affair. It is anathema to them and they will reject it in favor of a more self-determined way of life. It is in this way that men often end up with neither faith nor spirituality.
Shameful Faith
In my experience faith or any religious attitude in men is often accompanied by a feeling of embarrassment or shame on the part of the man. Men are certainly more likely to speak freely about work, their upbringing, sex and their relationships than they are to speak about their faith. My overall sense is that faith often doesn’t leave much room for a man to protect his dignity. Concepts of sin, judgment and punishment as well as concepts of eternal love stand in diametrical conflict with what many men think of as their own code of honor. I will first use some of the insights of Sigmund Freud to discuss how this may have come about. I will then demonstrate some of the more subtle ways in which shaming pervades religious discourse by taking a look at a passage from Thomas Merton.
Sigmund Freud
Among his many legacies Freud left us one that certainly was a sign of his time, viz. a thoroughly anti-religious attitude. Since the time of the enlightenment religion in Europe had suffered a decline because, increasingly, it had become something to be seen as a dimension of the human psyche rather than of a reality that is absolutely different from human existence. As such it was only a matter of time until someone would make the claim that the human psyche was just as well off without the construct of religion as it was, perhaps, well off without the concept of Santa Claus.
Most notable in the many critical voices that began to be heard all over Europe, albeit—remarkably—not in America, was the sentiment that religion was a way of infantilizing oneself or keeping others infantilized. Freud was not alone with his opinion. Names like Schopenhauer, Marx, Feuerbach, Nietzsche—to name only a few of the more famous ones—belong into the chorus of anti-religious sentiment. All, more or less, share this view: religion is undignified because it is the epitome of what Immanuel Kant 100 years earlier had called “our self-imposed immaturity.” This is the stream of thought into which Freud sets his foot in the early twentieth century.
Thus, when I go about quoting and analyzing Freud’s work below I am doing so not because I believe that he is the only one who influenced our attitudes toward religion in this way. Rather, I’m doing it because his words, likely quite unintentionally, reflect with such remarkable clarity on the inner struggle I have been observing in men as they go about understanding the coordinates of their position vis-à-vis faith. This also means that it is quite likely that Freud voiced his own misgivings about religion not so much as a scholar but also as a male who had suffered religion in his own life, both as a boy and a man.
So, as we begin to listen to Freud’s remarks I want to invite you to listen to them, in particular, from the perspective of the many things we have learned about men in the last few months. Listen to them from the perspective of what it means to be a man.
In a summary of his book Future Of An Illusion he remarks
I was much less concerned with the deepest sources of the religious feeling than with what the common man understands by his religion—with the system of doctrines and promises which on the one hand explains to him the riddles of this world with enviable completeness, and, on the other, assures him that a careful Providence will watch over his life and will compensate him in a future existence of any frustrations he suffers here. The common man cannot imagine this Providence otherwise than in the figure of an enormously exalted father. Only such a being can understand the needs of the children of men and be softened by their prayers and placated by the signs of their remorse. The whole thing is so patently infantile, so foreign to reality, that to anyone with a friendly attitude to humanity it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of life.
You can see that Freud’s basic assumption was that religion was a regression to a more infantile stage of being. In it we are looking to be nurtured and loved. Why does he think that? His main contention is that an adult would simply no longer experience the kind of helplessness and powerlessness that characterizes the infant’s emotional situation. Freud calls the feelings and needs that arise from such powerlessness “oceanic feelings”. So, while such feelings may still exist in adults they don’t really correspond to a realistic need that any adult might or should have. Religion is, in other words, a construct that does not respond to a true adult feeling. Ideally, adults should no longer have oceanic feelings, but should instead be able to respond to and manage their needs in mature and realistic ways. We might add that Freud probably also includes in this the need for scientific explanations which, since science does a good job at finding them, is no longer a necessary thing needed from religion.
So, given the strong separation of adulthood from childhood, of maturity from immaturity, Freud argues that the only logical explanation for why religion exists at all is that feelings of the oceanic kind have been maintained artificially.
The derivation of religious needs from the infant’s helplessness and the longing for the father aroused by it seems to me incontrovertible, especially since the feeling is not simply prolonged from childhood days, but is permanently sustained by fear of the superior power of Fate. I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for father’s protection.
The oceanic feeling and its concomitant need for protection are, in other words, a result of an artificial believe in and fear of fate. Here Freud takes us one step further into the emergence of religion, from religious feelings per se to the emergence of monotheism, those religions, in other words, that worship one god. How does he get there?
Freud’s basic argument is that that the “oceanic feeling” in no way satisfies our basic need for real protection. Freud submits that such protection can only come from a “father”, i.e., a strong person that can protect us “from the superior power of fate.” Yet, and this is the true hitch for Freud as far as religions are concerned, such a search for a father is a basic admission of one’s own lack of authenticity and authority. He believes that faith and religion ultimately undermine our dignity as thinking, decision-making beings, for they force us to surrender all real hope for pleasure and happiness and substitute as the only source of pleasure our own “suffering” and “unconditional submission.”
Freud’s critique of religion, then, turns out to be a critique in particular of monotheism, and there in particular of the monotheism of the Abrahamic kind. But, and this is crucial for our understanding of men and faith, Freud’s critique comes as a critique of the father. He identifies adult religion with a prolonged and unhealthy longing for a father. He thinks of such yearning as submission and infantile regression. Any self-respecting person, but especially every self-respecting male should see that longing for a father in this way stands in diametrical opposition to the task and need of one’s independence and self-sufficiency.
Freud’s views are instructive for us, because they give us a frame-work for understanding men in a religious context. Men neither want to be infantilized (a possibility Freud quite certainly associates with a regression to the maternal care of the infant) nor do they normally want to submit to someone or something in order to experience pleasure (a possibility Freud certainly associates with the disciplining hand of the father). Given this polarized view of religion and adding what we already know about men—viz. that they would stay away from both poles—we can see that there simply is no place for men in religion. Of course, if the current wars are an indication of what men choose, if they have to, they are more likely to choose submission and suffering as a form of pleasure than spirituality and oceanic feeling.
This means that for men—according to Freud—contact with religion is always tormented contact. It is always fraught with critical questions regarding his maturity, his will to power and his willingness to go it by himself. The inner psychic conflict that emerges from a confrontation with faith and religion is a conflict that circumscribes a man’s attempts to emancipate himself both from the sphere of the maternal and the sphere of the paternal.
As noted above and corroborated by conversations with men in my practice more men are likely to choose a faith that emphasizes submission and discipline than one that emphasizes universal connectedness, nurturing and love. Male faith is often aware of and afraid of judgment and punishment rather than forgiveness and mercy. Men, in other words, are more likely to choose a harsher variety of faith. One in which they have to prove their perseverance, righteousness and willingness to obey God. Of course, proving this also means that men will not complain while they are out to prove these things. Male faith often carries with itself traits of martyrdom, i.e., a silent acceptance of the pain that has been inflicted on them. Silent it is for religious reasons. Wailing about it would, ultimately, show a man’s weakness and inability to follow God’s will. This, by the way, holds true in all religions that see themselves centered around a God or Gods. It includes, of course, the Abrahamic religions, but also Hinduism, many African religions as well as some American Indian religions. In all of them the man of faith is the man who can endure and bear pain and even uses pain as a means of religious purification.
Thomas Merton
The need for something real and the protection that such connection with reality can have from shame can be seen in more subtle ways in the writings and teachings of many religious men. Take, for example, the case of Thomas Merton
The great theologian and religious mystic in his book Thoughts In Solitude reminds us that
There is no greater disaster in the spiritual life than to be immersed in unreality, for life is maintained and nourished in us by our vital relation with realities outside and above us. When our life feeds on unreality, it must starve. It must, therefore, die. There is no greater misery than to mistake this fruitless death for the true, fruitful and sacrificial “death” by which we enter into life.
Putting this into plain male language I would translate Merton’s passage in this way:
There is no greater failure than to be fooled about what’s real and what is not. If I want to be real I need to do/be in touch with real things. When we are connected with things that are not real, we become weak and will be killed. There is no greater embarrassment than to be killed for something we thought was real that turns out to be not-real. However, if something is a true cause (i.e., real), it’s worth dying for.
My translation of Merton’s words highlights shame as one of the most vulnerable issues in a man’s psychic constitution and in his search for faith. It is simply shameful to be mistaken. Especially when it is about something so important and vital as how to lead a spiritual life or a life of faith. How different could this passage have sounded, had Merton thought of taking out the words “disaster” and “misery” and, instead, said “sometimes it happens that we think something is real and it turns out it is not.” How different could this passage have sounded had he said “no big deal; forgive yourself; understand what went wrong and do it differently the next time. God loves you.” How immeasurably great would it have been, had he chosen to omit the verbiage about death (fruitless or sacrificial) and instead talked about life unambiguously? Such talk, by the way, would have included much attention to the subject of dying. But it would have stayed away from putting a judgment on the kind of death someone dies.
While Merton’s insights about immersion in unreality were clearly not meant to be about men only, they come to have a peculiar application to the state of men and faith. I believe that for many men it is the fear of what Merton calls “immersion in unreality” that keeps them distanced from traditional faith options and in search of a more meaningful, more moving and more invigorating faith.
Unfortunately, men’s need for being connected to something real, often ends up with men choosing suffering and pain over nurturing, war over peace, battle over conversation. Many men are looking for “the true cause” or the “sacrificial death” rather than a fruitless one.
Interestingly, faith for most men is rarely of a solely contemplative nature. Few men are satisfied to simply pray, fast, meditate and then pray some more. However, if they can do these things by causing themselves to suffer significantly, they might be more inclined to engage in these activities. What I mean is this, if men can find enough pain, i.e., a way of competing either against themselves or others in their exercise of prayer, fast and meditation they might feel more inclined to engage in it as an “activity of faith.” Again, we come up against the particularly male way of approaching the world through pain and surviving pain.
Men’s connection with nature
Throughout my practice and certainly also in my own life I have observed that men often are highly attracted to a connection with nature as a link to their own experience of something that goes beyond themselves. It is probably true that more men find something akin to spiritual happiness in nature than anywhere else in their lives (golfing not excluded). What is it about nature that has such magnetic appeal for men?
I think our understanding of Freud’s view on religion can be helpful. While it is possible to live in tune with, if not attuned to, nature, it certainly cannot be said that nature is a nurturing and loving sphere into which a man simply has to let himself fall in order to be saved. Quite to the contrary, the man who encounters nature unprepared will, most certainly, die! Being in tune with nature requires skill, talent and practice—in some cases even a little cunning and trickery. On the other hand, however, nature will never seem like an arbitrary force to which a man simply will have to submit, if he wants to be attuned to it. No, it is precisely this struggle with nature that makes it a masculine environment. Nature is not giving, but it is certainly also not taking. Whether a man emerges from nature with his dignity intact or violated depends solely on him. Nature simply is what it is. It acts in accordance with its own laws. Nature doesn’t judge. Nature doesn’t punish. In a way it could be said that nature lives its own stoic ways and, as such, becomes an example for how many men would like to live.
This, by the way, is quite different from how many American Indian men have looked at nature. To them nature is not a stoic other, but rather an enchanted universe. One in which Gods have to be satisfied, appeased and, on occasion, tricked in order to make it through. Nature in the American Indian view is moral. It responds to the wrong-doings of men and women by punishing it with droughts, storms, blizzards and floods. This is precisely not the “nature” many men are looking for when they embark on a nature experience. To them, nature is about a struggle for survival. In this struggle their force is no different from the force of the wind or the rain. The only question is who will supersede.
Immersion in nature, in other words, is without shame. There is no embarrassment or shame about having fallen into the arms of a nurturing maternal force. But there also isn’t a trace of the shame and embarrassment of having submitted and put oneself into the service of a disciplining paternal force.
Faith and Religion Without Shame
I believe that religion and faith cannot be passed on. They are decisions that are made individually and are part of a person’s ripening sense of the world and its limits and, perhaps, its sense of connectedness to an absolute about which we cannot say much that could be taken as truth by others. Rather, we can only talk about our own experience. Faith is always absolutely subjective.
For example, if I believe that there is a God who sits in judgment of my actions and that I should take this judgment into consideration when I act and decide, I might talk about this to my children, but it would be wrong to force them to frame their own actions in the same way. The experience that there might be an absolute power, benevolent or not, is an experience that can only come out of the experience of the limits of one’s own thinking and existence. I consider regular exchanges about such things with our children part of the way in which we can teach them faith and spirituality without shame.
Such exchanges include three general topic areas which each can have several sub-topics. These areas are
a) the limits of our existence
b) aesthetic experiences
c) ethical experiences
d) a combination of these three
In all cases our exchanges are done best and most effectively when we speak about our subjective experiences rather than some allegedly objective precept that everyone should follow. Above all else, though, it is important that we speak without shame and shaming.
Recently I had a conversation with my two older sons. We had dropped off our van at the shop and were walking the two miles home. It was about 8:30pm, dark and the last part of the walk led across a local cemetery. We drive past this cemetery almost every day. It’s rather large, but stuck between a Meineke and across from a car-dealership and a porn-shop just down the road we hardly pay attention to it. This time we did. As we entered it, we realized that what had looked like just a grassy area was actually crowded with flat tomb-stones, one next to the other. I reminded them that it was important not to step on any of these stones. We walked in farther and found tombstones from two centuries ago, old and withered, the writing barely legible anymore. We thought about what Urbana must have looked like when these people were alive. What were they thinking, feeling, wondering, worrying, laughing about?
Then came the question: Papa, what kind of tombstone would you like to have? I thought for a moment. This is a conversation I had with my father. I know what he wants, actually, a natural stone with just his name carved in it. So, I said to Noah, who had asked the question, I think I’d like something simple. Perhaps just a rock or a cross. Definitely not something carved and polished. And, I said, perhaps my name and birthdate, and a small thing you guys would like to say about me.
I think I would like something that’s shaped like a couch, Noah said, so that when someone comes to visit me there they sit down and talk with me. Jacob chimed in saying I’d like something like a tree-stump. No writing, just something that looks like nature. And, as always keen to match—if not trump—what his older brother says, if someone comes to visit my grave they can sit in the grass.
There is so much to say about this anecdote. But I would like to highlight just a few things that, in my opinion, are meaningful for the development of faith and spirituality in men.
a) as boys they need to have strong connections with their father
b) they need to feel and understand their father’s faith and beliefs.
c) experiences with each other, their father and other friends where reflection about others, past and future times can emerge
d) openness about death, spiritual questions, etc.
e) there needs to be an absence of shame/shaming in how they relate to each other
f) awe and other experiences of the infinite (through music, art, nature, etc.) need to be shared often
g) strong respect for others, their lives, their decisions, their ways of life.
h) A good sense of the balance between passion and task-orientedness on the one hand and the ability to let go on the other.
You might have noticed that I didn’t say anything about God, commandments, religious precepts, rules of holiness, etc. I only spoke about the world and how we live in it. If we can teach boys and men these things, if we can speak convincingly of how living mindfully, can be a way of living faithfully and without shame, then all talk of God and diving will merely be an afterthought, to be thought or not to be thought.
