Vulnerable Father

“The soul has many secrets... the way up is the way down.

I was raised in what we Catholics call pre-Vatican II Catholicism... by German farm parents. So I had a very traditional upbringing, but it also provided a wonderful safe container as I like to call it... If a young boy had any kind of inner God experience, and you were a Catholic, the only thing to do was to be a priest... I was in the eighth grade, I read a beautiful little book, called The Perfect Joy of St. Francis. And I said, “Oh my, I want to live a life like that.”... it’s a decision I’ve never regretted. I’ve had a wonderful life... I think they wanted to get us before we met a girl or something. [laughs]…

I’ve been telling the students at the school, “Picture three boxes: order, disorder, reorder.” Now what conservative people want to do is just keep rebuilding the first box, “order, order, order,” at all costs, even if it doesn’t fit the facts or fit reality. What’s difficult is so many people formed in the last 30 years were born into the second box of disorder... It’s much harder to grow up if you were formed after 1968. And yet, what I always tell the folks is there’s no nonstop flight from order to reorder. You’ve got to go through the disorder. Your “salvation project,” as Thomas Merton called it, it has to fall apart because it’s not really love of humanity or God or truth. It’s pretty much love of yourself. You don’t know that, and that’s not wrong. In fact, it’s quite appropriate...

The human ego will not give up control and hand over control until it has to. [laughs] Why would we? And, you know, the 12-steppers have discovered this. They call it the first step, the admission of powerlessness. But who of us would take on suffering voluntarily? It pretty much has to be forced onto us… I mean, the Buddha is even supposed to have said suffering is part of the deal. [laughs] It’s part of the deal... Jesus says, “Take up your cross,” which is not so attractive. But he’s much more leading us into the second half of life...

I gave a retreat two weekends ago in Santa Fe for 40 millennials, and what some of them have done already, for the poor in Africa, starting not-for-profits that care about this cause or that cause. And they conversed with me for a full weekend with some of the most mature, grounded, humble, responsive understanding to what I was saying… Some of the young people today feel like old souls. And some of my generation feel like old fools...

Non-dual is where you move into both/and, where you don’t look for all-or-nothing thinking. And we’re seeing it in our political debates today. It’s almost the only form of conversation left is all-or-nothing thinking. And it’s amazing to me that we could have this many universities in this country and could have this many churches and synagogues and mosques and have so many people still at such a low level of consciousness that they read everything in terms of either/or. And that’s why all of the world religions, discovered that you needed a different kind of software to deal with mysterious things, holy things...

You let the moment, the event, the person, the new idea come toward you as it is, without labeling it, analyzing it up or down, in or out, for me or against me. It just is what it is what it is what it is, without my label. At this point in history, you have to teach people how to do that because none of us are taught how to do that. And that, for me, says that religion has not been doing its job for several hundred years because that’s what we were supposed to evolve people to, a higher level of consciousness that would allow them to do things like love their enemies, overlook offenses...

It is so humbling when you see adult people just slip into such a beautiful peace and a beautiful freedom and a beautiful compassion. It’s not this emotional religion that we’ve come to expect, emotional religion should be, but just a quiet contentment, a quiet deepening, a quiet satisfaction that, “I think the universe that I’m a part of is beginning to make sense, and I’m a part of it. I’m a part of it, and therefore, I make sense.” See, I’m convinced that the discovery of a true God and the discovery of the true self are simultaneous journeys, and they feed one another. When you meet the true self, you’re most open to a bigger, truer name for God. When you meet a bigger, truer, more loving God, you surrender to that same identity within yourself...

I started reading everything I could on this rather universal phenomenon of male initiation… unless the male was led on journeys of powerlessness, he would always abuse power… the male just can’t handle power unless he’s somehow touched upon vulnerability, powerlessness. And it’s no surprise that a large percentage of men don’t even take religion seriously, with good reason...

I was jail chaplain here, a few blocks from where I’m sitting right now, for 14 years, and if there was one universal I found among the men in particular, but certainly the young women too, was it was rare, if not never, to find someone in jail who had a good father. That’s what got me just driven toward — we’ve got to start growing up men because the male of the species does not know how to hand on his identity, his intimacy, his caring to his children. And the rage in the young male who never had a dad or had an alcoholic father or emotionally unavailable father or abusive father is bottomless. It’s just — it moves out toward all of society, a mistrust of all authority, all authority figures, all policemen, of course, because — “If my dad abandoned me, I just basically don’t trust older men, and I don’t like older men.”

Now you can see what a bind this put us in when we defined God as masculine and called God “Father” exclusively. That’s one metaphor, but it is a metaphor. And so people who never had a loving male in their life, and we come along and say, “God, the Father, loves you,” they have no outlet to plug into, and that was my experience 14 years at the jail. I’d go in these cells, and I mean, these young guys would almost worship me because they’d never had an older man give them respect, give them attention, give them time...

Father hunger. It’s driving so many things in our culture, even this whole corporate world of the younger male’s need to please the big daddy and get his pat on the back or his promotion... I’ve had men older than me weep with me, still wanting a daddy, because they never had a father figure. It’s heartbreaking, really... Young men who haven’t been validated by an older male — because we look to our same-sex parent for validation — and when dad doesn’t tell me I’m a man or a good man or acceptable son, I think your first 30 years of life are so frantic, you don’t have time to read inner emotions. Your emotional life — there’s no subtlety to it, there’s no nuance, there’s no freedom, there’s no grace, there’s no time… suffering for so many becomes the only path because it’s the only thing strong enough to lead you into the world of grief, for example, or sadness or pain. And those tend to be the holes in the soul that awaken the inner world.

And so an important part of every initiation rite was grief work, letting men get in touch with their unfinished hurt and begin to talk about it with other men. That’s when the floodgates opened, and all of this success that they shined with externally they finally could admit was all a charade. Everything changed after that… I have found in the men’s work that a lot of men are afraid to expose this to their wives. I’m not sure exactly why vulnerability is such a scary thing for a man. What I found on the men’s retreats and the male initiation rites is that when a certain level of trust, vulnerability was achieved, men found it more open to talk to another man about this than even a woman.

Now afterwards, they would go home and blurt it all out to their wife, too, but as much as they love their wife, I think so many men are afraid of looking weak or vulnerable around their wife or their girlfriend, yeah… it’s the strangest combination of being able to hold deep sadness and deep contentment at the very same time. So I discovered that in myself, and my most wonderful moments were also my most sad moments, which leads you to a kind of participation in what I called earlier “the one sadness,” that your very fact of enjoying grace and love carries with it a dark side that I didn’t deserve to know this, I didn’t earn this, and most people think I’m crazy if I try to talk about it. So the two intense emotions very often coexist in the contemplative mind.

So that’s what taught me this both/and world view, that opposites do not contradict one another. In fact, they complement and deepen one another...

Some years ago, I started recognizing that I was getting an awful lot of adulation and praise and some people treating me far more importantly than I deserved. And I realized I was growing used to it, that the ego just loves all of this admiration and projection. And a lot of it was projection. And I didn’t want fame and well-knownness and guru status to totally destroy me, and so for me, this became a necessity, that I had to watch how do I react to not getting my way, to people not agreeing with me, to people not admiring me — and there’s plenty of them — and that I actually needed that. And so I do, I still, I ask God for one good humiliation a day, and I usually get it, one hate letter or whatever it might be. [laughs]

I have to watch my reaction to it. And I’ve got to be honest with you, my inner reaction — I’m not proud to tell you — is defensive, is, “That’s not true. You don’t understand me.” I can just see how well-defended my ego is. And of course, even your critics — and I have plenty of them — at least 10 to 20 percent of what they’re saying is usually true… I’ll recognize that very thing she’s so angry at me for saying, I really could’ve said it better, and I didn’t use the right word. Now, a lot of Christians are trained to be what we call word police. They’re always getting you on the right word, and it does drive you crazy after a while. So I try to learn from my critics, and they’re often the best of teachers, frankly...

The Latin poet Terence is supposed to have said, “Nothing truly human is abhorrent to me.” I think the truly human is always experienced in vulnerability, in mutuality, in reciprocity. When human beings try to deny their own vulnerability, even from themselves, when they cannot admit weakness, neediness, hurt, pain, suffering, sadness, they become very unhuman and not very attractive...

I’m anxious to present the vulnerable God, which, for a Christian, was supposed to have been imaged on the cross. But again, we made it into a transaction. Transaction isn’t vulnerability anymore, really. Vulnerability transforms you. You can’t be in the presence of a truly vulnerable, honestly vulnerable person and not be affected. I think that’s the way we are meant to be in the presence of one another.”

~ Richard Rohr is an American Franciscan friar ordained to the priesthood in the Roman Catholic Church in 1970. He is an inspirational speaker and has published numerous recorded talks and books, including The Divine Dance: The Trinity and Your Transformation (with Mike Morrell), Yes, And...: Daily Meditations, Immortal Diamond: The Search for Our True Self, Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life, The Naked Now: Learning to See as the Mystics See, and Eager to Love: The Alternative Way of Francis of Assisi. He is founder of the Center for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque, New Mexico.