Final Thoughts and First Thoughts

I completed reading "Iron John" by Robert Bly this morning and began a new book on male spirituality entitled "From Wild Man to Wise Man" by Richard Rohr. Here are some final quotes from the first book and an opening thot from my new read:

"The Wild Man encourages and amounts to a trust in what is below...a trust in the lower half of our bodies, our genitals, our legs and ankles, our inadequacies...the earth itself...the stubborn richness to which we descend. This attention encourages us to follow our own desires, which we know are not restricted to sexual desire, but include desires for the infinite, for the Woman at the Edge of the World, for the Firebird, for the treasure at the bottom of the sea, desires entirely superfluous. (A man's) wants are to be trusted, that even when their gratification seems furthest off, the uneasiness they occasion is still the best guide of his life, and will lead him to issues entirely beyond his present powers of reckoning. Prune down his extravagances, sober him, and you undo him." (Bly, 225)

There is something in this passage that strikes a chord so deep and low that it seems to resonate in my chest. I can hear the objections, however...objections of hedonism and anarchy that this would create. Yet there is a richness here that may address what has certainly been a downfall of Western spirituality - i.e. attempting to control one's spirituality through morality and proper behavior and by denying one's will and desires. I'll leave it at that for now...

I began the second book by Rohr very shortly after finishing Bly and it began with these gems:

"In my experience there is an almost complete correlation between the degree of emphasis one puts on obligations, moralities, ritual performance and one's lack of any real inner experience." (Rohr, 1)

"Now, believe it or not, we are threatened by such a free God because it takes away all of our ability to control or engineer the process. It leaves us powerless, and changes the language from any language of performance or achievement to that of surrender, trust and vulnerability. This is not the preferred language of men! It makes God free and us not. That is the so-called 'wildness' of God. We cannot control God by any means whatsoever, not even by our good behavior, which tends to be our first and natural instinct...To us it feels like wildness - precisely because we cannot control it, manipulate it, direct it, earn it or even lose it." (Rohr, 2, emphasis his)

"The full male journey is a risky journey where you can only trust God and not your own worthiness or rightness. It is a journey into the outer world, into the world of risk, uncertainty and almost certain failure." (Rohr, 3)

Interesting language which also resonates within me and brings out feelings of being at home - this makes sense out of much of my experience. Perhaps what Bly speaks of in terms of trusting the lower half of our bodies (which are wild and lead us in many and various ways) is similar to what Rohr describes as the "wildness" of God.

This probably isn't the proper thing to say, but men have been accused of thinking with the wrong part of their body for so long that I wonder if we now bear a tremendous amount of guilt for what are incredibly natural (and I would suggest inherently spiritual) impulses and desires. Perhaps it is time to celebrate the "wildness" of God, trust the leading of the spirit, and obligatory "proper" behavior be damned.