The Hidden Spirituality of Men: Ten Metaphors to Awaken the Sacred Masculine
368
The Hidden Spirituality of Men: Ten Metaphors to Awaken the Sacred Masculine
368eBook
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781577317920 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | New World Library |
| Publication date: | 09/24/2010 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 368 |
| File size: | 499 KB |
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The Hidden Spirituality of Men
Ten Metaphors to Awaken the Sacred Masculine
By Matthew Fox
New World Library
Copyright © 2008 Matthew FoxAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-57731-792-0
CHAPTER 1
FATHER SKY: THE COSMOS LIVES!
FATHER SKY is AN ANCIENT ARCHETYPE for naming the Sacred Masculine or the Divine Masculine. It is found among indigenous peoples, such as Indians of South America, who have a saying: "To be human one must make room in one's heart for the wonders of the universe." This call to relate to the wonders of the universe is found among many religions, including the people of the Bible, the Jews and Christians and Muslims. And certainly this call is found in today's science.
But the modern era (from the seventeenth to twentieth centuries) shut down Father Sky — indeed, it rendered the term practically meaningless. This left the male heart bereft and potentially more violent, for men had no place to invest their sky-sized hearts and souls. D. H. Lawrence sensed this when he wrote: "What a catastrophe, what a maiming of life when it was made a personal, merely personal feeling, taken away from the rising and setting of the sun, and cut off from the magic connection of the solstice and equinox! This is what is the matter with us, we are bleeding at the roots, because we are cut off from the earth and sun and stars, and love is a grinning mockery, because poor blossom, we plucked it from its stem on the tree of life, and expected it to keep on blooming in our civilized vase on the table." What happens when cosmology is replaced by psychology? When cosmic connections are displaced by shopping malls? The heart shrivels. Men's souls shrink. And untold violence goes through their heads.
It was not always this way. Nor does it always have to be this way. Today's postmodern cosmology opens the sky up again to amazing goings-on, and in the process invites men to rediscover Father Sky and the Sacred Masculine.
SKY GODS — THE PREMODERN SKY
For most of human history and in nearly every culture, the sky has been considered an abode for the Divine. Christians sing "Glory to God in the highest" and "you alone are the Most High" in their liturgies. They tell the story of the Transfiguration, when Jesus went to the top of a mountain with three of his friends, and he was shown glorious as they all entered inside a cloud. Christians also tell the story of Jesus "ascending into heaven" after his death and resurrection. Jesus taught his disciples to pray like this: "Our Fatherwho art in heaven...." And for Paul, the first Christian theologian and cosmic mystic, the Christ is the one who unites "everything on earth, under the earth and in the heavens."
In his sermons, the great mystic Meister Eckhart makes consistent and fluid connections between the sky and the earth. He says the heavens "invade the earth, energize it and make it sacred." He says the heavens "are continually running, running into peace" and seek repose. Eckhart recognizes the stretching that the human undergoes in its search for the Divine. For the divine spirit in the human soul "is not easily satisfied. It storms the firmament and scales the heavens trying to reach the Spirit that drives the heavens. Because of this energy everything in the world grows green, flourishes, and busts into leaf. But the spirit is never satisfied. It presses on deeper and deeper into the vortex, further and further into the whirlpool, the primary source in which the spirit has its origin."
The Jewish people tell about Moses encountering God at the top of a mountain, Mount Sinai, and encountering such glory there that he had to cover his face with a veil for the "skin of his face was shining" so. And in Psalm 99 we hear that God "is high above all peoples," a "mighty King, lover of justice and establisher of equity" who spoke to Moses, Aaron, and Samuel "out of the pillar of cloud." The psalmist recommends that we "look up" to the mountain and to the heavens to see God, especially when things are not going so well on earth. As Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi points out, this is the opposite of the missionary position in sex when men look down. Instead of looking down, men are to look up. To the vastness of God's sky.
Pre-Christian characterizations of Father Sky abound. Among the Aboriginals of Australia in the Dieri country, the sky is understood to be a vast plain inhabited by wild tribes that are the prototype of the Aboriginals themselves. When a drought threatens the people on earth, they call upon their supernatural relatives in the sky to make rain happen to save the peoples on earth. The southeastern tribes of Australia believe in supernatural sky beings called "AllFathers" or "Sky Beings." The father of them all is Nurrundere, who made all things on the earth, bestowed weapons of war and hunting to humans, and also instituted all rites and ceremonies. Nurrundere took all his children with him and traveled to Wyrrawarre, which is the sky. The sky is his homeland. One connects with the sky god through ceremony: for example, if the tribe kills a wallaby and the wallaby is cooked, the hunters chant as the fire, kindled by women, raises smoke to the sky. As the smoke ascends, the hunters rush in and lift their weapons and branches toward heaven.
Another Australian tribe, the Wiimbaio, believe Nurelli made the trees, animals, and land, and after giving laws to the humans he went up to the sky and is now one of the constellations. Other tribes call the Supreme Being — who once lived on the earth as a Great Man but eventually ascended to the sky — "Our Father" or "Father of All of Us." For the Kulin people, the son of God is Binbeal, the rainbow, who teaches humans the arts of life and social institutions and who ascended to the sky land, from where he oversees the tribe.
Interestingly, among the Aboriginals, there is a special encounter with the "Father," whose voice resembles that of distant thunder, during male puberty rites. Teachings include stories of the creative deeds and anger and disappearance from the earth of the Supreme Being now dwelling on high. He fashioned the ceremonies and made the bull-roarer (located under the foam of the breakers in the ocean), which is the sound representing his own voice and gives the medicine men their powers. When a person dies, this Supreme Being meets and cares for his or her spirit. Thus the spirit, like smoke from the fire, ascends into the heavens and returns to the ancestors there. The ancestors are the stars. It's worth noting that these stories of celestial supreme beings antecede any presence of Western missionaries among the ancient tribes of Australia.
In the Aranda-speaking areas, it was believed that the earth and the sky had always existed and had always been the home of Supernatural Beings. The western Aranda believe that the sky is inhabited by an Emu-footed Great Father who is also the Eternal Youth. He has dog-footed wives and many sons and daughters, and they live on fruits and vegetables in a land that is eternally green and unaffected by droughts. Through it the Milky Way flows like a broad river and the stars are their campfires. All these sky dwellers are as old as the stars and death never touches them. The Great Father of the sky appears as young as his children.
Death happens only on earth, and that occurred because connections were severed between the sky and the earth. A ladder between earth and heaven, or a great tree, was cut down, and so the bridge between earth and heaven was destroyed and death ensued. Immortality and ageless youth belong to the celestial bodies and Sky Beings. Through symbols and ceremonies here on earth entrance is gained to the sacred and life-giving world in the sky.
The Australian Murinbata tribe of western Arnhem Land talk of a pure spirit who lived during the "dream time" named Nogamain, who is a skydweller. Some identified him as the man in the moon, others did not. But once when they were asked, "Where does he live?" the tribe raised its arms toward the entire sky and said, "On high." He sends down thunder and lightning and spirit children who are good children.
Across both Polynesia and Micronesia there is a great commonality of belief around a divinized sky. The sense of the heavens' enormity is certain to have been experienced by those who sailed long distances under its expanse — and who depended on the stars and night sky to guide them on their perilous journeys. In the Maori traditions of southern Polynesia, the gods operate in the realms of sky, earth, and underworld. Rangi (heaven) and Papa (earth) are the divine ancestral pair from whom humans descend. Among their six children, only the God of Forests, Birds, and Insects can raise his father up to the skies, since he is firmly planted on his mother the earth. In Polynesia, "the greater gods are almost always 'heavenly.'" And in Micronesia also, major deities associated with biocosmic forces are usually from above.
African tribes also often divide the universe into two parts: the visible and the invisible, the heavens or sky and the earth. African scholar John Mbiti writes: "The heavenly part of the universe is the home of the stars, sun, moon, meteorites, sky, the wind and the rain, with all the phenomena connected with them such as thunder and lightning, storms, eclipses of the sun and the moon, 'falling stars,' and so on. It is also thought to be the home of God, although people cannot quite locate where he dwells, other than saying that he lives in 'the sky,' in 'heaven,' or 'beyond the clouds' or they simply say that 'god does not live on the earth like man.'"
While the heavenly part of the universe is the father, many Africans understand the earth to be the mother and refer to her as a living being, "Mother Earth," "the goddess earth," or "the divinity of the earth." Earth is sacred, and she is honored by ceremonies and other expressions of respect, as are her parts, such as mountains, waterfalls, rocks, forests, trees, birds, animals, and insects.
Many African myths say that at one time in the past the heavens or sky and the earth were united as one. Some myths teach that there was a ladder or rope between the two worlds but that a separation took place. Some say that animals bit the leather rope into two so that one part went up to the sky and the other fell to the ground; some say that it was through man's fault that the two parts of the universe were split. In any case, a severing occurred. (Is that much different from the Garden of Eden story?)
The universe is seen as without edge, just as the earth has no edge. It is eternal. Thus circles are important in ceremonies and rituals, for they symbolize the continuity of the universe and its unendingness. Birth, death, and rebirth rituals also underscore the fact that life is stronger than death.
Native American peoples have a strong sense of the Great Spirit in both its immanent and transcendent presence and its identity as Father Sky. For example, Big Thunder of the Algonquin tribe says: "The Great Spirit is in all things. He is in the air we breathe. The Great Spirit is our Father, but the Earth is our Mother. She nourishes us.... That which we put into the ground she returns to us." And Chief Red Cloud of the Lakota prays to a heaven-centered father: "I hope the Great Heavenly Father, who will look down upon us, will give all the tribes His blessing, that we may go forth in peace and live in peace all our days, and that He will look down upon our children and finally lift us far above the earth; and that our Heavenly Father will look upon our children as His children, and that all the tribes may be His children, and as we shake hands to-day upon this broad plain, we may forever live in peace."
Among the ancient Greeks, the Sky Fathers were hardly admirable characters. Zeus evolved. His father Cronus had consumed his seven children out of fear they would take over his power. Zeus swallowed Metis (the goddess of feminine wisdom) to abort a son he feared would take over from him. Says Jean Bolen, "The mythology of the sky gods (Uranus, Cronus, and Zeus) reflect changes in the father archetype."
For Aristotle, it was a combination of the order and the beauty — one might say the elegance — of the sky that moved him to posit a Deity. In a very early book probably put together when he was a student in Athens, Aristotle wrote, "Those who first looked up to the heavens and saw the sun running its courses from its rising to its setting and the well-ordered choral dances of the stars sought after the Craftsman of this very beautiful design and conjectured that it came about not by chance but by the agency of some mightier and incorruptible nature, which was God."
For the premoderns and indigenous peoples everywhere, the sky was alive. It harbored God the Father, among others, and was full of watchful eyes tending to human needs. Not so the God of the modern era.
THE SKY GOD OF THE MODERN ERA
The modern era put the Father God of the living sky to bed and eventually to death. "The death of God" that Nietzsche recognized in the nineteenth century very much corresponded to the death of the sky. From roughly the seventeenth to the early twentieth century, modern science (unlike premodern and postmodern science) taught that the sky was a machine, and if it needed a deity, it was only to oil the machine once in a while. Eventually, that lone duty was taken away from God as well. So we hunkered down, men especially, expecting no help, no insight, no enlightenment from the sky. We took our vast energies for which we were made, all of us being capax universi ("capable of the universe") in the words of the premodern philosopher Thomas Aquinas, and we constrained our souls to fit under a mechanical sky and within an industrial world. We substituted the awe of the heavens with the awe of humanmade destruction.
Newton taught that the universe is essentially a completed product, like a machine. Our task is to fit in, to obey the machine. There is little creativity in such a universe. Indeed, creativity gave way in the modern era to compliance. And obey we did. We fit ourselves into our increasingly mechanized world, and this sophisticated technology took the stone that Cain used to kill Abel and converted it to tanks and gas, to submarines and aircraft carriers, to machine guns and atomic bombs. As our destructive capabilities increased, our reptilian brains went crazy. Violence came to rule the world on unprecedented scales.
Under a secularized sky, despair ruled. Barbara Ehrenreich talks about "an epidemic of depression" that hit the European world in the seventeenth century and culminated in a rash of suicides. An "anxious self" emerged that transformed "the individual into a kind of walled fortress, carefully defended from everyone else." Might this collective autism be what happens when we are cut off from Father Sky? Consider the two modern thinkers John Calvin and Bertrand Russell. The first was a religious figure who arrived at the dawn of the modern era, and the latter was a philosopher and scientist who arrived near the end of the modern era. Both gave voice to an existential despair that looked around and saw fate as feckless and humans as essentially useless.
John Calvin was a religious reformer of the sixteenth century, and he wrote in Institution Chretienne, "No matter where we look, high or low, we can see only a curse that, spreading over all creatures and embracing the earth and the sky, ought to burden our souls with horrible despair." Despite his religious beliefs, John Calvin had no cosmology that could pull him out of this despair. He confesses:
If God had formed us of the stuff of the sun or the stars, or if he had created any other celestial matter out of which man could have been made, then we might have said that our beginning was honorable ... but when someone is made of clay, who pays any attention to him? ... [So] who are we? We are all made of mud, and this mud is not just on the hem of our gown, or on the sole of our boots, or in our shoes. We are full of it, we are nothing but mud and filth both inside and outside.
Bertrand Russell, a mid-twentieth-century philosopher and mathematician, echoed Calvin's pessimism in an essay entitled "The Free Man's Worship":
That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroes, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the laborers of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins — all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the first foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Hidden Spirituality of Men by Matthew Fox. Copyright © 2008 Matthew Fox. Excerpted by permission of New World Library.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Preface: Why "Hidden"?,Introduction: In Search of the Sacred Masculine,
PART I: TEN ARCHETYPES OF AUTHENTIC MASCULINITY,
1. Father Sky: The Cosmos Lives!,
2. The Green Man,
3. Icarus and Daedalus,
4. Hunter-Gatherers,
5. Spiritual Warriors,
6. Masculine Sexuality, Numinous Sexuality,
7. Our Cosmic and Animal Bodies,
8. The Blue Man,
9. Earth Father: The Fatherly Heart,
10. Grandfather Sky: The Grandfatherly Heart,
PART II: SACRED MARRIAGES,
11. The Sacred Marriage of Masculine and Feminine,
12. Other Sacred Unions,
Conclusion: Real Men Are Bearers of the Sacred Masculine,
Appendix A: Exercises for Developing the Ten Archetypes,
Appendix B: A Thought on Rites of Passage,
Endnotes,
Acknowledgments and Permission Acknowledgments,
Index,
About the Author,
What People are Saying About This
“Matthew Fox might well be the most creative, the most comprehensive, surely the most challenging religious-spiritual teacher in America.”
— Thomas Berry, author of The Great Work
“In The Hidden Spirituality of Men Matthew Fox has written a book designed to make all of us, men and women, more mindful of the spirit-streams in which we live our journeys, whether consciously or not. It is a gutsy, courageous book, one that confronts the terrible isolation in which men live with archetypal images that once nurtured, guided, and connected our ancestors and that still course within the depths of each of us. If we are to redeem our souls from the numbing banalities of our culture, we have to access spiritual values that enable us to give our lives to something worthy once more.”
— Dr. James Hollis, Jungian analyst and author of What Matters Most: Living a More Considered Life
“Every man on this planet should read this book — not to mention every woman who wants to understand the struggles, often unconscious, that shape the men they know. If you want to understand what is out of whack in our culture — from politics to personal life — and how to heal and transform it, you’ll rejoice in this book that combines the wisdom of the ages with the most forward-looking combination of feminist spirituality and contemporary psychological and philosophical reflections!”
— Rabbi Michael Lerner, editor of Tikkun magazine, chair of the Network of Spiritual Progressives, and author of The Left Hand of God
“A wake-up call to shake us free from old stereotypes of masculinity, this book is good news — and essential reading for men and those living in a world with men. Matthew Fox, at his most enlivening and insightful, describes, arouses, and liberates archetypal forms of male spirituality so desperately needed in these leaden times. These forms for embodying the sacred strengthen the warrior and the guardian within me as well. I know no better medicine for the mounting violence in our streets and in our hearts.”
— Joanna Macy, author of World as Lover, World as Self
“Matthew Fox, a one-of-a-kind voice, a wild man of religiosity, turns his loving heart toward emancipating modern men from an overculture that if left to itself would only use up men’s blood and bones. Fox holds a different vision of the masculine as creative, voluptuous, and filled with spirit.”
— Clarissa Pinkola Estés, PhD, author of Women Who Run With the Wolves and weekly columnist for the National Catholic Reporter Online (ncrcafe.org)
“Once again, Matthew Fox brings his spiritual and earthly wisdom to the critical issues of our age. Fox shows how the challenges of humanity — environment, conflict, and social justice — are linked to the spiritual crisis faced by Western men. He demonstrates that we can start repairing our relationship with the earth and its citizens by repairing our own relationship with the sacred. The Hidden Spirituality of Men is essential reading for men who dream of becoming more effective agents of change, contributors to family and community, and warriors in the struggle to make the world a better place. Fox shows that if we wish to repair a world that faces crises of militarism, injustice, and ecological collapse, we must start with the conflicts and potential within ourselves and work outward from spiritual strength.”
— Rex Weyler, cofounder of Greenpeace International, author of The Jesus Sayings, and coauthor of Chop Wood, Carry Water
“Matthew Fox is a beacon of creative wisdom for our time! In this historic and revolutionary book, he inspires us to divinize male sexuality and exorcise the self-imposed and culturally held demons that bring violence and environmental desecration to our world.”
— Alex Grey, artist and author of Sacred Mirrors, Transfigurations, and The Mission of Art
“Matthew Fox’s book is a magnificent masterpiece.”
— Andrew Harvey, author of Son of Man and The Hope