This is the first part of a two-part series on Father Ron Rolheiser’s recent talks about masculine spirituality.
By J. Michael Parker
For Today’s Catholic
SAN ANTONIO • Men constantly struggle with relationships — with women, with other men, with children and with the church — because they have lost touch with certain masculine energies, Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI, told a group of some 77 men and women recently in the Alamo city.
Father Rolheiser gave a retreat Feb. 5-8 at the Oblate Renewal Center titled “Male Energy and its Habitual Struggle with Relationships, Feelings and Religion.”
He said that feminism, a catalyst for the men’s movement, initially asserted that men struggle to relate to women because they have lost touch with their feminine side. But Robert Moore, a University of Chicago anthropologist, said it’s because they’ve lost touch with their masculine side.
Father Rolheiser said that Moore, after attending many feminist seminars, began to notice that, for all the good ideas feminism brought out, many men who attended those seminars, though sensitive, took no delight in their gender.
“Most sensitive men are depressed. They’re so afraid of being jerks or idiots, they’d rather be depressed than to act out their masculine energies,” the priest said.
While feminism has revised its critique of male approaches to relationships, the priest said there is still a strident form of feminism that says that the archetypal male is bad.
“Men have inhaled that. They’re not getting the blessings they need from their fathers, and it doesn’t take much for them to believe [that they are bad] in their own guts. Men have a bad self-image, and they’re apologetic about being male. When we feel like that, there’s going to be a lot of depression,” he said.
“Masculine spirituality is an attempt to put men into a deeper touch with their peculiarly masculine energies,” said Father Rolheiser, president of Oblate School of Theology and author of several popular books of spirituality. “It’s to free them from a constriction of the heart.”
Men suffer more from gender depression than women do, and they try to get rid of it through achievements, he said. “They say, ‘I’ll make the winning score in the Super Bowl,’ or ‘I’m going to earn $10 million,’ or ‘I’m going to become the brightest star in Hollywood.’”
Many seek extramarital affairs, but he said affairs only make them less free, not more.
Anthropologists believe that gender depression is rooted in wounds to men’s masculine identity, and those wounds can only be healed through getting in touch with their masculine energy, since it did the wounding, he added.
Conversely, if someone is wounded in the feminine part of her identity, she can only be healed by feminine energy since it did the wounding.
Father Rolheiser said that male gender depression didn’t start with the rise of feminism. It started back when men started killing animals. Then they began killing each other in war. But he said the biggest milestone in modern men’s depression is the Industrial Revolution, which took men out of the home to become breadwinners while women stayed at home to raise children.
“Fathers can tell their children how to do lots of things, he said, but if the children want to talk about life, most fathers say, ‘Talk to your mother,’” he said.
Mothers typically do more with their daughters than with their sons, and as a result, girls are more relationally astute than boys.
The priest said that men’s hunger for paternal blessings is probably the greatest hunger in the world. Often they’ve been blessed by their mothers, but not by their fathers.
“The blessings that are the most powerful are within the same gender, but it’s easier for mothers to bless their daughters than for fathers to bless their sons,” he said.
He cited Jesuit Father Daniel Berrigan, who with his brother, Father Philip Berrigan, was a longtime peace activist and often criticized even bishops.
“Dan Berrigan said, ‘My father couldn’t bless his sons. He didn’t bless Philip and he didn’t bless me. No wonder I’ve been such a cantankerous person, angry at practically every bishop in the country. I’m still angry at my father.’”
But there are men who are good at blessing their sons, and they have learned this from watching their own fathers, Father Rolheiser said.
“It doesn’t necessarily have to be in words. If you’re mother or father is beaming at you, you know they’re blessing you.
“But if you see your dad is frowning at you, he’s cursing you. If you show him that you’ve made good grades and he says, ‘So what?’, that’s King Herod saying, ‘I’m going to kill you.’”
He said this doesn’t necessarily happen at one particular time. It’s hundreds of little incidents, such as when a 6-year-old boy shows his father a flower and the father dismisses it as junk and says, “throw it away.”
But Father Rolheiser said that men can be healed of this gender depression to the extent that they access and act out positively the energy within them; conversely, they will be depressed and angry, acting out the energy in negative ways, if they don’t access the energy positively and act on it.